WESTERN CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE
CRUISE SHIP CARNIVAL SPLENDOR AT SEA

IN A.D. 2015, DEC. 23
LIGHT DOWNPOUR

Formerly a subsidiary of a British-American corporation, Western Carnival Cruise Line was a state-owned enterprise after the seizure of two Splendor-class cruise liners by one of the sides in the Second American Civil War. The state in question, the Pacific American Alliance, completed the two 113,300 GT cruise liners at no small cost, part of a desperate initiative to stabilize the tourism industry crucial to its economy.

By 2015, the Carnival Splendor had a well-established route of gambling cruises along Northern California, California, and military-occupied Baja California before diverting towards now-independent Hawaii. It carried a crew of 1,200 suffering employees of the state-owned enterprise and almost three thousand guests, running the gamut from wealthy American war profiteers, Eurasian oligarchs, Chinese moguls and Korean magnates to moderately successful television and movie actors out of Hollywood and the current generation of nouveau riche of postwar Silicon Valley.

Ann and her sister Uni decidedly belonged to the first category, of that there was no doubt. They'd been employees of the cruise company for almost six months at this point, after concluding that it'd be easier to commit payroll tax evasion if a substantial portion of their salaries as croupiers came "under the table".

As had been the case in the past, the sisters both had very different expectations as to what "under the table" had actually meant when the scenario was proposed to them. Still, as Uni noted, it couldn't be worse than stripping.

"I hate this stupid boat."

In the tiny cabin they shared on the lowest staff level in the Carnival Splendor, Anna attempted to button close the too-small maroon vest she wore over her too-small white blouse, the top half of her dealer's uniform. Both sisters had aggressive undersized clothing issued to them, which they originally attributed to the human clumsiness of their suppliers combined with their advanced height. After all, none of the other female dealers were over 183 centimeters tall without heels. But before the conclusion of their first gambling cruise, both sisters realized that this could only be part of the reasoning: another consideration was putting their large breasts on display underneath their formfitting uniforms as a courtesy to the hungry eyes of their mostly-male clientele. Neither of them found it amusing for more than a few seconds.

Anna watched her "elder sister" attempt to close the top button on the vest, stretched out over her chest. It took all of Uni's dexterity not to simply rip the button from its stitching. "Maybe you can get a bigger vest," she noted.

"I'm not talking to that bitch again," Uni grumbled, referring to the uniform supply manager with whom they both had a poor relationship. "You know what she'll say."

"Maybe you shouldn't be so tall, huh?" Anna perfectly imitated the manager on staff before laughing. Uni shot daggers at her with her eyes before looking back into the mirror. Her blouse was already stretching under pressure, making the task even more challenging.

A wireless transmission pinged both their brains—orders to hurry up, as their shifts were about to begin, from the shift manager's computer. Anna heaved a sigh while Uni triumphed over her vest and turned, grinning from ear to ear, up until the blouse button immediately above her vest shot out like a tiny plastic skeet disc. Anna could barely control her own laughter out of a fear of reproducing the effect for her own clothing. Uni took her by the ear and dragged her out of their shared cabin to the staff lift at the end of the hall.

Waiting on the casino floor, surrounded by garish season décor, was their usual shift manager, called a "floorman". Impatiently waiting for them, he was a middle-aged Californian with a gleaming bald head and a few grey hairs encircling it, old-fashion wireframe glasses, and an exasperated expression. Like most of the other floormen, he lacked cyberization and by extension the ability to communicate via cybercomm—instead, he barked his orders out manually. Both of them comfortably towered over him.

"Be any later, why don't you?" he snapped at them with a slight whine. "Putting up with you too…Anna, you're on roulette. Uni, twenty-one."

After waiting longer than any human being would reasonably take to respond he snapped at them again. "Well, what're you waiting for?"

"Come on Larry, you're splitting us up again!" Anna whined in turn. Uni expressed her agreement by nodding in a dramatic fashion, long hair bobbing up and down in the process. "We didn't do anything to deserve this!"

"Didn't do anything…you two know what you do when you're back to back!" he snapped back, referring to the back-to-back arrangement of the dealers at the blackjack tables. "Now go do your actual jobs!"

The two made an exaggerated display of their dismay, complete with slouched posture that still left them substantially taller than he was, before he shooed them off more forcefully. "And fix your blouse!" he added as Uni passed him. "This isn't that kind of cruise!" Facing away from him, Uni stuck out her tongue childishly.

Anna relieved the dealer at her assigned roulette table, another woman, also Californian though much younger and with bleached blonde hair, whom would reasonably be considered attractive by the standards of her players. Most of the attending gamblers looked mildly surprised to see her, but were not dissuaded as she seamlessly took over her predecessors' responsibilities, not even stopping to introduce herself—the nametag on her vest did that. Uni moved slightly slower, opening an unoccupied blackjack table and taking out the necessary, and fiercely monitored, card decks, and began shuffling four of them. Both sisters, trained in the card game that was the introduction for most professional croupiers, manually shuffled cards, for the sheer novelty of it: nowadays, a competent cyberbrain user with enough personal dexterity could shuffle multiple decks of cards as thoroughly as a typical shuffling machine, and was a reliable crowd pleaser. For the sisters, it was just another symptom of typical human inferiority, being amused by the same simple trick over and over again. Anna could "sense" Uni's burst of distaste for the incoming customers who wandered to her table, but she kept a pleasant smile on her face while introducing herself. They worked for tips, after all.

How's the crowd look today? Anna asked, half teasing, over cybercomms.

About as ugly as usual. Uni continued masking her distaste. Whomever said Southern California was where all the beautiful people lived never went on a gambling cruise. Croupiers who were cyberized, as most of them were on this ship, were permitted to communicate over cybercomms—expected, in fact, when it came to preventing cheating or conspiracy among players. Personal chitchat was discouraged, albeit weakly, and neither sister expected anyone to eavesdrop—their considerable processing power afforded them easy access to encryption based on constantly changing random number generation. Basic, but effective. They knew communication via text messages, or alphanumeric code for that matter, was more efficient then audio transmission, but they'd found themselves preferring this inefficient medium more and more over the years.

But the trophy wives are on point tonight, huh?

Uni's eyes flickered when she scanned the room behind the players after donning a semi-obligatory festive red Christmas hat with a white fluffy ball at the end. Yeah, you're not wrong.

Mark my words, in a few years, they'll replace them with gynoids. It's cheaper in the long run, she predicted. "Gynoid" had become the industry generic for commercial androids modeled after women rather than men, rather than any sort of scientific classification.

That's stupid. Uni continued dealing.

Which is why they'll do it! Humans!

She didn't have a good rebuttal to that. A customer became hysterical about the hand dealt, and she kept smiling vapidly. Since it was raining, the casino deck was more crowded than it would be otherwise, the passengers' amusement options somewhat more limited. The seas were calm, fortunately, and the precipitation certainly wouldn't last, and tomorrow seemed like another clear day, though not to their benefit.

Hired crew like themselves did have certain permissions to enjoy the amenities provided on the cruise, in rigidly defined hours dependent on their employee performance, but it seemed like an utter waste. After the first early afternoon the twins had taken advantage of their deck privileges, they'd gone out in scanty string bikinis to sunbathe—something they were biologically capable of—and tease a few passengers whose eyes were wandering too much for their own good. But aside from some petty larceny and returning to their accommodations with a few wallets that didn't belong to them hidden in their towels, it'd just been a waste of time. Teasing humans with sunbathing topless wasn't as amusing as it used to be, using their precise sensors to chart the precise line-of-sight of oblivions men and occasional women craning their heads for a look at their chests pressed against the deck furniture or synthetic muscular flesh interrupting by the band of their thongs had lost is comedic value. Uni wondered if they, like humans, were experiencing diminishing returns when it came to enjoyment in life, and if so, what the next move would be. Self-termination was a pretty obvious answer to that, but they agreed that was probably a little dramatic. Maybe it was just being at sea. Later they tried sunbathing for the sake of sunbathing even though, surely, they were above such petty human vanity, and it provided no health benefit (or for that matter, health loss) to their superior synthetic bodies, and their prefect tans faded far faster on top of that.

Their shifts went off without a hitch, Anne only encountering one particularly belligerent player at the roulette table. Before she could look for an opportunity to lay him out on his back, hard, while making it look like he was just another clumsy oaf, the human's traveling companion dragged him off, so she put it out of her mind. At the mandated conclusion of their shift, while they waited for the obligatory return of the floor manager to inefficiently clear them, Uni dazzled a few other passengers with a few simple card tricks.

Remember when we used to do this to survive?

Facing the other direction, Anna nonetheless raised an eyebrow. In the earlier days, during their careers as freelance prostitutes—the two didn't care for pleasant euphemisms—they'd both gotten relatively competent at less sordid, and less legally dubious, side occupations, starting with the three-card confidence trick. Uni in particular had mastered it, but for that particular con, the two merged into a singular, sunglasses-wearing individual.

In a way, we still do.

Uni twitched. Yeah, that sucks.

When the time came, the two descended on the casino buffet, after the customers had finished but before the food was discarded. Technically, neither sister needed to eat—not the same way humans needed to—but their complete bio-mechanical digestive systems, modeled after humans, could still derive chemical energy and certain useful molecules from breaking down food and excreting the rest. Alcohol was a particular treat, though none was available at the buffet. And just as importantly, humans seemed reluctant to bother them when they were eating.

The two loaded their plates with whatever food was at hand, occupied free table space in the adjacent kitchen, then quickly stuffed their mouths. Taste, temperature, portion-size hardly mattered: for all practical purposes, they were incapable of choking without force applied to their throats, and they closed of their airways until they were finished. There was no reason not to fill the stomach-shaped chemical reactor located in their thoracic cavity as efficiently as possible, especially when it was otherwise empty and collapsed in on itself.

A trio of men from the cooking staff paused their conversation in Spanish to watch as Anna crammed four intact dinner rolls, one by one down her own throat, followed by a bowl of soup, while Uni devoured several friend chicken legs and wing, bones and all, accompanied by unpleasantly loud crunching. By the time they relocated to the other end of the kitchen to continue their conversation, the two had largely cleared their plates and resumed their conversation over cybercomms.

What about the alternative?

What alternative? Uni asked while tearing apart a grapefruit with her polished-white teeth, rind and all.

You know!

Anna, we're on a ship. Humans aren't that bright, but I'm pretty sure they could find two six-feet-tall strawberry blonde thieves on a ship. Since the two had started their employ at a casino, well before they were posted to the floating variety, they'd mutually considered direct theft as a more efficient take on contract employment. By now, they'd pocketed their share of poker chips and cash tips, taking care never to be caught, but Anna knew, as did her sister, that this was woefully inefficient for their purposes. Somehow, their lives were more expensive than those organic ones of humans.

Anna's response to her appraisal was flip one of her plates noisily against another and stand up. A likewise finished Uni did the same; both wiped their faces with napkins, fixed their uniforms as much as they could, and returned to the gambling floor for their next shift. More susceptible humans to charm out of their guard and separate from their money. The routine of semi-regular employment.

Uni was dealing cards when she messaged Anna again over cybercomms. Do you remember Benjie?

In spite of herself, Anna physically cocked her head at the roulette table. The players didn't seem to notice amid their chatter. God, I haven't thought of him in ages. 'Ages' meant 'more than a week' for her.

Whatever happened to him?

Anna's eyes briefly flickered in Uni's direction, who visibly pouted as she consulted her memories. A player was momentarily distracted by this, convinced it was relevant to the ongoing game. Did he kill himself yet?

I don't think so.

It was not an exaggeration to say that Anna and Uni only came to North America because of one man: Venjamin Leonidovich Zholtok, a Russo-Latvian entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and a young avtoritet, or "authority" in an organized crime cell in far northwest Russia. V. L. Zholtok, very capably for his age, had brilliantly utilized the 1991 collapse of his own country to his own advantage. In the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he acquired the money and means to purchase the two most advanced bio-gynoids ever manufactured, which he'd intended to use as collateral on loans to fund future operations and his rise in the still loosely-defined structure of the criminal underworld.

Unfortunately, V. L. Zholtok had at least one intellectual weakness: he couldn't connect history to modern politics. He understood that Eurasian organized crime had its origins under the Tsarist Autocracy two hundred years earlier, and had nearly been wiped out during Josef Stalin's purges during the Great Terror, prior to the Germany's invasion and the Great Patriotic War. During and after the war, the mafia entered maturity and cemented its place overseas, waiting for a better time in their homeland. Business in the Union was tediously difficult, though far from impossible; it was simply more practical and lucrative to operate in the rich, capitalist world by and large. He understood that time came in 1990 and 1991, when the country tore itself apart. But he did not understand fully understand the implications of what had happened. What sealed the fate of his own personal empire was the 17 March 1991 Union Referendum.

The 17 March Referendum on the preservation of the Soviet Union, pertaining to the replacement of the 1922 Treaty on the Formation of the Soviet Union with a more modern agreement, the New Union Treaty. It was invariably confrontational, as six independence-leaning Soviet republics boycotted the referendum, either entirely opposed to the idea or preferring to draft their own referendum. Showdown led to showdown: when the Georgian Republic boycotted the referendum, the Russian and Abkhazian populations of Georgia boycotted the republic's own independence referendum in retaliation. Another "war of laws" had begun. V. L. Zholtok aggressively read the newspapers across the political spectrum, unlike some of his colleagues in the criminal underworld who preferred less mainstream information sources. He earned a reputation as something of a scholar, even before his interest in cybernetics. Dutifully, he also voted, after an undue amount of consternation and soul-searching: on one hand, it seemed common sense that Russians should control their own affairs, Ukrainians Ukrainian affairs, Latvians Latvian affairs, and so forth. On the other hand, the Soviet Union had given him his education, and his first job as a young man, managing payroll at a public bank in Riga after he finished his military service. Without those, he might not be engaged in a successful criminal enterprise in the first place. In the end, he voted against, though not as easily as he would've expected.

By and large, the referendum was successful. In the Russian Federation, 75% of eligible voters turned out, casting their ballots 70% in favor, as they did in Ukraine. In Soviet Kazakhstan, 94% voted in favor, and in Azerbaijan, 93%. Overall, 77% of the vote was cast to preserve the country in some similar form. But predictably the democratic vote did not matter so much: the ironically-elected leaders of many republics did not consider the results legitimate, and simply ignored the acts of the parliament that had brought the vote forward. The outcome was not obvious: despite unprecedented levels of visible dissatisfaction of the ruling Communist Party, near-daily demonstrations across the country, enough loyalists remained to ensure a political mandate, if not an actual means to act upon it. In August, a failed coup by military and security leaders doomed the ruling party further. The Union, and the country, was finished. V. L. Zholtok could sympathize with those who found it distressing, even if he and many others celebrated.

In Russia proper, the man at the center of this was the ex-Communist Party president and prime minister, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. V. L. Zholtok had never followed an election so closely in his life, and was even a little proud of his sense of civic duty. He felt his side had won a hard-fought victory: he was certainly not alone in benefitting from the dissolution of the country into a new organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States. But the transition proved less convenient than expected. Across Eurasia, the civil disorder of the dying USSR had turn into the outright warfare—the kind with tanks, aircraft, and rockets—of the newborn CIS. In Russia, the local branch of the Communist Party maintained internal discipline and swept the elections in the parliamentary Supreme Soviet. The economy was utterly destroyed and a debt default—something that had never happened in the sluggish, rigid command economy of the Soviets—was almost guaranteed before the decade was out. President Yeltsin would be impeached by the Communists and their allies on the left, and terms were brought against him in 1993. The commander-in-chief responded with tanks and security troops sent into Moscow. Having sat out the 1991 August Coup, the military took sides in Yeltsin's 1993 Putsch. From one perspective, it was the president in one last struggle against a Communist remnant clinging to power. From another, it was the elected parliament fighting for its survival against a would-be dictator who'd stripped the rest of government of its authority. He personally wasn't certain which side he believed, but he knew which side he wanted to win.

Blood ran in the streets worse than any time in a century, and tanks fired on parliament. In a hyper-violent staring contest, the president blink and parliament apparently won. Some suggested it was owed to a health complication, as the president's health had never been excellent—V. L. Zholtok believed so too—that forced him to flee to NATO custody in Germany. With their commander-in-chief gone, the military sided entirely with the parliamentarians. The revanchists won, and parliament got its impeachment in absentia. Aleksander Rutskoy, less a Communist and more a vice president who intensely disliked his own boss, became president. V. L. Zholtok was terribly disappointed.

Everything seemed to come apart after that. In actuality, it was too late for parliament, now in control, to alter many of former-President Yeltsin's new economic policies, though some attempt was made. Even their hated enemy had acknowledged certain concessions, like the matter of Belarus. The small, highly-industrialized republic depended on Russian trade to survive, and its military was invariably integrated with Moscow even as the rest of the CIS attempted to divorce its military forces as per the new political order. Another was Armenia, now at war with Azerbaijan: two ex-Soviet republics currently engaged in a genuine military conflict over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Then there was Kazakhstan, sitting on one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals—and Almaty had been more opposed to independence than anyone else. He always thought the two facts were related.

It took ten years to come up with a "solution"—the Union of Eurasian Republics. A shared economic bloc was supposed to help minimize, if not mend, the economic bloodletting of tearing the Soviet economy apart, especially as trade with Europe and North America lagged. The CIS armed forces, reformed into a unified Eurasian military, was the simplistic solution to suppress the ethnic fighting not just in Nagorno-Karabakh, but throughout the Caucuses, particularly on the Chechen-Dagestani border, and it offered an obvious strategic appeal. The left-wing parties, Communists included, hastily drew up a consensus to secure their mandate to rule, based on their victories in the past decade and the legal standing of the referendum of 1991, however genuine that was. Good relations were sought with the independent Baltic republics, which joined together in their own loose federation. In actuality, international paralysis became the norm of the day, with the United States reinforcing its status as the sole world power.

That situation came to an end after the Third World War, a disastrous conflict with few winners, but the United States as one of the undisputed losers. He lost as well, having failed to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the collapse of the world superpower.

Of course, the changing of names and flags didn't put V. L. Zholtok out of business, even if it was supposed to. Even with the political or moral defeats of 1993 and onwards, he was still smart enough to make his fortune. He'd diversified his investments among trusted compatriots in Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, along with enterprising businessmen in Poland and Germany seeking investment amid economic slowdown. He'd been misled over the cost of the pair of bio-gynoids—he knew they were no normal love dolls, but his fascination with the technology, and admittedly the novelty of owning them, got him into a disastrous commitment. When the Third World War triggered a global depression with the termination of the United States Dollar as the world's reserve currency, the twins were seized from Locus-Solus by UFJ Holdings, a bank out of Osaka, only to be stolen by Japanese gangsters, who needed to quickly offload them for cash. Even then, they should've been out of his price range. Pride kept him from seeking the assistance of his superiors. Before he knew it, his entire legitimate fortune in Russia proper was tied up in two unusually tall blondes.

It was then the Union government decided to launch its long-promised war on organized crime. And they started with those criminal authorities who'd chosen the wrong side in the 'Nineties, including Yeltsin-stumper V. L. Zholtok. He was in Riga, looking for legitimate investments when a sympathetic associate in Leningrad warned him of the government's impending purge, and he was forced to liquidate his assets in return for overseas stores of narcotics prior to their seizure. The sisters became property of an independent spin-off of the Gulf Cartel in Brownsville, Texas. V. L. Zholtok became persona non-grata in the Eurasian Union and, narrowly avoiding the wrath of the nation, resettled permanently barely ten kilometers from the Latvian town he'd been born in decades earlier.

There was no way to spin himself out of that disaster. Three-fourths of his wealth, his entire Russian fortune, went to North America in a shipping crate along with a cache of knock-off purses and counterfeit video discs. The narcotics he eventually got in return were a fraction of the sister's projected worth.

The last the sisters heard of Venjamin Leonidovich Zholtok, he was thoroughly ruined. The Baltics were hardly tolerant of Russian organized crime, even that of an anti-leftist nature, and his Latvian citizenship no longer bought him protection after 2010. He'd vanished somewhere in rural Estonia, near Saaremaa, largely forced out of gangster life, or so they heard.

I don't think he killed himself. He's probably still living with some floozy in suburban Estonia. You know, like the ending of that gangster movie, the American one. Where they all shoot the camera.

Uni mentally nodded. You know, he wasn't that bad.

For a gangster, no, Anna agreed. But he was as stupid as the rest of them.

The two burst out laughing at their tables, to the bewilderment of their customers. Whenever they were feeling down, replaying the tragic tale of V. L. Zholtok, the thinking man's mobster turned mafia washout, never failed to put them in good spirits. It was another thing that made them exceptional, they thought; most stories of human trafficking, by contrast, began and ended in tragedy. Theirs ended with the ruin of a crime boss and a free trip across the Atlantic Ocean.

Anna was facing in the right direction to notice their middle-aged shift manager scurrying about, mobile phone in his hand. Briefly she thought he was angry about their laughter, but watching his awkward gait across the floor in the opposite direction seemed to confirm he wasn't.

What's Larry's problem?

Anna's eyes narrowed. Besides being old, fat and bald? It looks like he was getting a call from the higher ups.

Something wrong with the ship?

Maybe, but why would they be calling Larry? Anna mentally frowned as she watched the roulette wheel spin once more, followed by a number of despairing humans expressing their grief at the result. You don't think he's actually connected to…you know…

Connected to what?

I don't know, it's a casino ship! Fill in the blanks! Anna's eyebrows twitched as the roulette wheel spun again. Whatever's going on, we want to know.

Right, right! Uni dutifully agreed.

Sneaking away from their shifts was less of a challenge with the floorman's departure, accomplished by strategic placement of 'OUT OF ORDER' signs that they noticed humans tended to obey even when they seemed completely unrelated to the circumstances on hand, like being left atop a roulette table.

Still wearing their uniforms, they followed Larry as discreetly as their tall statures would allow, out of a side exist adjacent to the staff exit they had used to enter at the beginning of the workday. Uni tore off her holiday headwear and looked at her twin.

"How were the tips?"

"Poor. The season of generosity my ass." She nodded in agreement as they slunk through the hallway, which ended at a maintenance stairwell, which Larry laboriously climbed while complaining loudly. He almost heard Anna's snickering at his belabored breathing near the top of the last flight of stairs, but still exited to the outer deck into the rainy mist outside.

"So, how often do you think Larry Richard, a fifty-seven-year-old casino pit boss with bad knees, goes outside?" Uni asked suspiciously from the bottom of the stairs.

"Maybe he's taking a smoking break?" Anna replied as Uni climbed the last flight and carefully nudged the door open, peering through. Uni followed after her, heels awkwardly clicking against the brushed steel stairs.

Anna stepped out into the evening mist first, her uniform turning damp while she stood under an exterior light. Larry had circled around the maintenance walkway to what she thought was the stern helicopter landing pad. Her ears twitched underneath her thick, matted hair.

"That's a multi-engine aircraft," she announced as Uni crept after her, who nodded in agreement once she isolated the same sound ahead of them. It took them circling around to the stairs leading up to the landing area before they could actually see the sound's origin.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered.

"That's a V-22 tiltrotor long-range aircraft belonging to the former United States Coast Guard," Anna rattled off mechanically. "Two Rolls-Royce T406 turboshaft powerplants, normal crew of four."

"What the hell is it doing on the Splendor?" Uni hissed as Anna shushed her.

Larry Richard, joined by the Carnival Splendor's head of security for the casino floor and a senior staff officer, were already engaged in tense conversation with a raincoat-wearing lieutenant in the Pacific American Coast Guard, his blue-and-red working uniform brightly illuminated by the landing pad lights. Part of the aircraft's crew, standing nearby, kept to themselves as the Splendor's senior officer made the introductions.

"Larry, this is Lieutenant Hewett, United States Coast Guard."

"Pacific American," Hewett corrected him politely. "Or just 'American'."

"Sorry, American Coast Guard."

"How do you do?" Larry asked nervously, shaking the lieutenant's hand as presentably as he could manage.

"Lieutenant Hewett's come all the way out here looking for two women wanted in Santa Clara Valley for…grand larceny, was it?" the senior officer asked, glancing back at the Coast Guard officer, who nodded firmly. "Cheque fraud, credit card fraud, general identity fraud, et cetera."

Larry nodded obediently as the lieutenant produced a thin digital tablet inside a waterproof casing and tapped the screen on, which he presented to him. "Do they remind you of anyone you know?"

"Shit, shit, shit!" Uni hissed, pressing her body against the slick deck of the ship at the landing pad's foundation, as if that would make her harder to see. "They came all the way out here for that? Larceny? Don't they have anything better to do, isn't there a civil war going on?"

"This must be how Benjie felt," Anna moaned, flattening herself next to her twin.

The two kept watching as the senior officer continued listing off the charges, with occasional corrections by the Coast Guard officer, followed by a list of reasons why the crew of the Carnival Splendor had every intention of cooperating. Larry gave a flustered response that he didn't think it could be his pair of six-foot-tall blonde croupiers in such a manner that even he wasn't convinced about what he was saying; he then relented and assured both the lieutenant and the Splendor's head of security he knew where they were and would take them to them immediately.

"Oh, way to have our backs, Larry!" Uni hissed at the group as they followed the same path back to the maintenance stairway in the steadily increasing downpour. Anna shushed her again as they kept their hiding place within close to the helipad.

Uniform thoroughly soaked, Uni brought her knees together against her chest and rested her chin, frowning. "Now what do we do? When Larry sees we're not on the floor, it's not going to take that long for him to find us. Especially if he's having one of his more lucid days, and remembers the ship has CCTV installed."

Anna nodded, sitting on her legs, face twisted in concentration. The seconds were already ticking away, and in the creative cognition center inside her skull, she could picture Larry slowly but fussily making his way down the stairway, back through the staff hallway, and back onto the gaming floor, where he would find a pair of conspicuous signs announcing their absence. She turned to Uni, wet hair matted against her forehead. "Well, whatever we do, we don't have long."

Uni's eyes widened momentarily before narrowing to match those of twin. "That's right."

"I was getting tired of this job anyway, weren't you?" she asked.

Uni nodded quickly. "Yes, I was too."

"And you know it's going to suck to work the Christmas Party, right?"

"Right."

"And we both know how to operate a Boeing V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, right?"

"Right," Uni answered too quickly, before her face froze in bewildered but neutral expression. "Wait…Anna."

"And those V-22's cost nearly twice what a comparable heavy-lift helicopter does, military boondoggle and all. We could probably barter something out of that too."

"Anna!" Uni hissed. "Sis, that's a sixty-million-dollar Coast Guard transport aircraft! What do you think the government does to people who hijack those?"

"'Hijack' would imply forcing the pilot to fly us away from this crappy cruise ship. Leave that for humans who can't intuitively operate complex multiengine aircraft," Anna declared, a maliciously confident grin appearing across her face. "Hope you didn't leave anything in your room."

"Aside from ninety-eight percent of the poker chips we stole," Uni replied.

"Not that you can liquidate those easily wherever we go. Come on, if they're as stupid as the average humans we've got a minute before they realize what's going on and at least one more of them comes back here." Anna looked back at her sister, an unnecessary physical gesture, eyes wide with excitement. "You wanna' do this, or you wanna' jump into a lifeboat and take our chances with the storm and seagulls?" she asked, almost gutturally.

Uni expression had frozen again, before she unclasped her hands, put them apart, and flexed her arms and chest, tearing the buttons out of her uniform vest and blouse. She could move her muscular frame more easily now and gave a nod.

Anna's grin grew. "Okay then, sis. Normal crew of three for Coast Guard service, likely male, very likely bored and horny. Should be easy for two hot babes like us."

"Should be carrying SIG Sauer P229. Forty-caliber, equivalent to ten-millimeter automatic," Uni recited.

"I dunno' about that flying deathtrap, but their pieces are definitely worth something," Anna growled. "Now come on, let's go teach a few human males the unrealized depths of their stupidity."

As correctly predicted, at the far end of the long, narrow passenger compartment, a three-man Coast Guard aircrew waited in the aircraft's almost-exclusively digital cockpit, a half-dozen multifunction displays arrayed out for the pilots, while the flight engineer looked up from his own workstation just in time to see a pair of tall blonde women lurking silently in the dim light of the cabin, their rain-soaked croupier uniforms unbutton and forced-seductive expressions framed by long, matted hair, long legs raised against the cabin walls. The third crewman stared at them silently, mouth ajar, before raising the visor on his helmet and blink until he recognized the two wet women standing there.

"Sir, aren't those the two…?" he asked after turning away, before Anna and Uni leapt on all three of them and tore them apart.

Author's Notes:

So, I really can't offer a good excuse why it took me more than five years to update this story (especially since this chapter was probably 80% or more completed when I finally returned it, good grief). Ghost in the Shell and Dominon both remain dear works in my heart, particularly Stand Alone Complex, and the Puma Sisters themselves remain favorites of mine. I've got some high hopes for this going forward, even if I'm still unsure about how to write a pair of sexy, sociopathic android criminal twins (this is only second portrayal of them in that mindset, after the conclusion of Remarkable Behaviors). Please, please! Let me know if this is actually read-able or too radical a departure from my usual heroes (or heroines, for that matter) to actually work!