"Fool at the Tower, Reversed"

The Colonial Authority gave me the red hat a long, long time ago. It was beaten-up when I first got it, and is now blanked-down all these years and months later.

It's a hat for wildlife hunters in the alpine with earflaps and poormach-stitching. My grandpappy had one when he taught me to shoot fowl in a preserve in Labrador. No fancy circuitry for sensors or comms; just the insignia of the universal shield and stars on the side. It's a nice accouterment for my job- I suppose the government has to do something with the clothes no bummer with dignity would want to wear. My hat's kept me warm while exploring the abandoned mines of Blackthorn, kept me cool from the awful ceiling lighting of Torgau Satellite, kept me camouflaged and stealthy in a thousand barroom bloodbaths, kept my head dry from the industrial-grade rain that's currently drizzling upon Merchant Freeport.

The punker shot my hat off. Not the first occurrence of its kind, except he was using a fucking genuine blaster.

I felt the hat burn up in halves- the second skin of the fabric ripping off of my skull, and the top of it flying in front of my face, landing perfectly in my bowl of pricey, imported New England cream chowder I had just bought after a relatively successful assignment.

Well, a centimeter away and I'd be dead. I spun around on the barstool on a dime, shocking the hell of the punker with my Hypnos Tas. The kid, dressed in the faux-pirate rags that are all the rage in decrepit societies, seized up and crumpled at the doorway of Lucky Lou's.

The barrel of his ArmsWorth blaster was still smoking. I took the gun and slipped it into my pocket, then turned to Lou, who was cowering behind his counter. He's been new at the frontier lifestyle, having recently moved here from San Jorge, a town in some small province on some boring planetoid somewhere in the Terra system. But he's learned a lot- he's trembling but at least he has a bar cleaner in hand. Lou's definitely going to need the shotgun when the big league rowdies turn his cantina into an arena of death.

I sighed, and pulled out a dull credit coin and flipped it towards the bar. As the coin landed in a cup, a well-armed, fully-armored military constable strutted in dressed in full colors.

"What's all this, then?" he demanded in a rough and utterly dumb-sounding voice.

He would have blasted me away and taken half of the cantina along with me if I hadn't managed to press the button of my timepiece, projecting my holographic license in midair. His kind don't take kindly to not getting a chance to shoot and yell orders and brutalize people. Since I wasn't wearing my badge-hat, his one slot memory would have no room to hold the idea that I hadn't fire the first shot, earlier. The permiso didn't help. I tried to tell him that the punker had fired at me for no apparent reason, but all the dimlight would do was to shrug his shoulders, claim that pk-ing was out of his jurisdiction, reinforce the excuse by further claiming that he was off-duty, and walk away, leaving me with the would-be killer kid.

I remember that it was here when I started muttering about all of the crap I had to deal with at the near nadir of the frontier ladder. Before I could inspect the body, the kid suddenly got up and ran out the door.

The Hypnos Tas shot I had fired held enough voltage to stun two res-mammoths. By all rights, the punker should have been comatose and struggling to breathe.

I didn't have time to turn to Lou with a poorschmill expression on my face, the way goonloons usually look when you pull a quick one on them. My first and only response was to run after the kid. Thinking along the way, I took out my ancient Colt .45 semiautomatic, a third century anniversary special. My great grandfather bought it, and it still gleams as if new.

The interior afternoon weather of Merchant Freeport is a hazy atmosphere of drizzle. It was a fresh and new alternative to the heavy, choking rain, and the light, invisible sprinkling that would have made me trip over a railing and plummet off of the raised street. Even though Merchant Freeport is in a completely enclosed dome, and so completely under control of the colony's administrators, the weather is still completely fouled up with heatstroking summers and industrial rain. The water's so thoroughly mixed with the factory smog that being here is like reliving 19th century London, 20th century Los Angeles, 21st century Beijing, or any similar emphysematous hellhole. Why they would have huge factories when this is the largest trade planet outside Sol and Terra is beyond me. To make things worst, the skyscrapers, while not truly rascas, are built atop raised platforms next to raised overpasses, with forty stories above the platform and ten more underneath. Streets hundreds of meters over other streets.

Idiotic colonials. They might be hardcore for carving out their own little place on the despondent frontier, but they still can't escape bad engineering in urban design. Earth might be a boring 'topia with the overweight plague, but people there can at least build cities that make sense. Merchant Freeport is just one of many settlements that had its charter owners go bankrupt, become abandoned for an undefined number of time, and then half-heartedly rebuilt by developers. Colonials can't draft a blueprint worth anything. No wonder Bladerunnerville is such a success- old Earther folk have to go somewhere in the system to laugh at the crappy conditions their poorer cousins have to live in.

Well, I'm Earther myself, and stupid enough to be out in the stars chasing after adoles who pack heat and shoot you behind the back. Pray I don't slip and slide my way off. The crowds are surprisingly sparse; I guess there's still rumors that the rain's pH level is climbing. There's a reason why prospectors like us wear heavy jackets and trench coats.

I didn't know why I was chasing the kid, I realized after the instinct wore off. I supposed I just want to get him back for wrecking my hat- my hair is starting to dissolve. Also, he's a metanatural occurance. There's been urban legends that the Tas don't work for one schmill in a thousand, rather than zero out of fifteen-plus billion, that gene therapy coupled with advanced Jedi training can help a person avoid getting the worst shock in their lives. Whatever. Guess the Second Amendmenters and survivalists are afraid that their firearms aren't powerful enough to hurt craze loonies, witches, or their most favorite ethnicity to persecute.

So as I weaved between the stands of knickknacks and between display tables of crap, as the stainrain beat down upon my head like a taxman at the debtor's door, as the astrosuited tourists yelled curses at me for wandering into their latest picture and spacers looked spicily from out of darkened bar entrances, we ran into a department store.

It's the size of a full shopping mall on Earth, almost as long as the main street of a small town. It glinted with mall-time gold. The inside was nice and temperate. Not a lot of people around. We ran from section to section. Up escalators and down elevators. He caused quite a mess, throwing stuff around, trying to trip me. I had my Tas and holo permiso out, shocking more uppity bystanders than really try to hit the punker.

The kid ran out, towards the First Colonial Bank of Richtown on Deckard Drive. I nearly got ran off the road as an idiot on a airbike swerved in front of me from a street on the left.

He turned and jumped off of the platform road into the city below.

I immediately stopped and poked my head over the side, cautiously. Hundreds of meters below was another lane of concrete, this time covered with personal transports and trucks. Punker wasn't anywhere to be seen. If he had fallen, the splotch where his body was would have been mortar-and-pestled to the bottom of the ground, but I couldn't see red anywhere. And then his hand grabbed by collar.

Having no witnesses around was a mixed blessing. On one hand, I didn't have to deal with any tourists asking questions, crying afoul, demanding basic human rights, that sort of thing. Then again, someone to call the real cops would be good in the situation. Of course, it just had to be a bank holiday. I'm not the type to call for help before I've apprehended my perp, but this kid was somehow sticking to the underside of the street while keeping a hold on me strong enough to keep my body pinned onto the sidewalk as my head and neck dangled over the drop. I reached for my .45, but all I found was an angry boot as I blindly clawed on the ground at my side.

I twisted my head to see who it belonged to. It was a gypsy pirate king, dressed gaudily with a EastEuro 'stache and that look of stereotyped conniving. He had a trick with the long throwing knife in his hands, making it disappear in one and teleporting it to the other. He looked ready to toss it into my skin.

Beside him was another Roma, dressed less colorfully but also with a bandana around the neck. It was plain blue with a fading logo of a shield shattered by a plumed spear. The guy held my weapons in one hand, pointing them at me. The fellow was much heavier than the other traditional type, and was actually very jacked, muscles fully unfurled and tendons pulsating in waves. It was completely unnatural. The guy looked as if he could have picked up a car.

Oh, damn it all.

The gypsy motif was just a sham. They weren't simple pirates either, nor even run-of-the-mill rebels. They were another one of the Colonial Authority's closet skeletons. Experimentation in null-G, biofeedback, virtual 'reality', psychotropes made from alien flora, the whole shebang. They got set free without another thought after one bureaucracy obliterated another without bothering to check the details of the little experiment. No, I doubt it was actual induced human anti-gravity and personal matter teleportation. But they sure are hellalot stronger and speedier than us regulars.

And I had managed to kill one, a long time ago, on Brahe around Caph. I had no choice but to bring out the heavy firepower in a way both unsportsmanlike and uncharacteristic of my style.

Actually, it was the mission I was just on…

Now I had no firepower. The toughman had my hands tied behind my back. The punker was up here. The toughman grabbed me by the neck and held me up decimeters in the air. Classic pose.

The king addressed me. "Son of the mundane, meddler with what is unfathomed to you-"

I interrupted. "Decatur would do. Your lot does a lot of meddling in the unfathomed yourself."

He grinned. "We are here to deliver the punishment for the murder of Ceferino Jovanovic by an outsider who is foolish enough to invade Roma lands."

I snorted. "You're no more Roma than I'm Inuit. Stop showboating and get to the punishment."

The king grinned wider and threw the knife at me.

Instinct saved me. I half-turned, half-spun in the grasp. It was actually quite comfortable, as the grip was loose enough so I could speak and breathe. The knife flew away. I spat at the toughman, drenching his face. He didn't flinch. Must be used to this situation. We've all been here before.

"You are swift and brave, outsider Decatur. For that we shall give you an even swifter death!"

With that, the guy threw me off the platform.

I was actually quite lucid once I had my back to the streets below and stopped screaming. I wondered why the little trio above had only arrived in such a small number. Didn't these people have courts? Why would the king come all of the way here personally to seek revenge for killing a subject? Oh, that's right, they're only pretend gypsies. Whatever. I desperately wished for a propelled incendiary. Don't think they're swift enough to outrun a minor-miner-missile.

I wasn't prepared to die yet. Nihilistic as this job and life is, I actually have a few friends and family back in civilization. And I never did learn how to play the piano.

CRUNCH. I knew this might happen, even when traffic is low. I had landed on the hood of an aircar a third of the way to the street. I turned towards the glassplate and pressed a button on my timepiece. Then I pointed up.

A message bulletin was blinking on the dashboard. "ALERT: Colonial Authority operative in distress. Assist immediately or this activated message will result in maximum charges!"

Sometimes it was good to work for the big league.

I couldn't really see the driver through the tinted window, but he saw me. I got the lift, jumped off, and thanked the driver by deactivating the alert message by another button press.

I was only a few meters from where the whole episode had taken place. Gypsies nowhere to be seen. The weapons were on the ground. Odd. They're the lot to take a guest into shelter, charge him for the stay, cut his throats with the high prices, and then rob his belongings when he's away. But they left my gran abuelo's .45, and the Tas. It wouldn't be until the next day that I would discover that the Tas was useless with the most expensive part missing, and the .45 was in need of serious overhaul from a craftsman, most who are unavailable out here in the kuso colonial life.

The rain beat down on the pavement like a taxman to the debtor. My hair is almost liquid. The simulated sun is falling, and the crimeslimes will be out soon. I needed to buy me a souvenir.

I need a hat to shoot people in.

One was waiting for me when I got myself back into my room, on a chair facing the door. It was multicolored, and had the symbol of the pierced shield on the front. Other than that, it was a replica of my old hat. I took one look at it, closed the door, and didn't bother getting the few toiletries left inside.

In space onboard the Shore of Tripoli, I read that a massive fire had broke out in Richtown on Merchant Freeport, caused by an explosive from an unknown source at the tiny lodge I was staying at.

I didn't anticipate that. I thought it was just electrified.

Never gonna take Tarot again.