Reece spun his punchout in circles and surveyed the bar with some sense of nervousness. He had his thopter and a nice pile of bonus dollars, but no idea what to do with either. He had a vague notion of starting some kind of secure courier service but had no head for business. He was taking his time with combing through his contacts in the Force, looking for someone that might have a job lead, but so far everything had come up empty.
He happened to look up when the door opened, so he caught sight of the kid when he shouldered his way in. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and he was weighted down with enough junk to render himself clumsy. Reece watched as he bumped into three different people and dropped half his kit. It took him damn near five minutes to achieve seated status on a bar stool, and by that time everyone in the Nail had labeled him “fresh meat.”
The Brass Nail was a dive that had decent food, watery beer, and V-set that everyone swore was possessed. It also had a reputation as a meet-and-greet for those folk with “off the grid business,” which is why Reece started drinking here. Not that he was looking to get into thievery or anything, but with his prospects dwindling, things like privateering and outer-city mutant runs were starting to look more appetizing.
By the time he gathered up his punchout and beer and sauntered over to the kid, no less than three of the locals were scamming him. Two sat on either side making some kind of sales pitch, while the third picked his pocket—
“Yeah, V-gas distilleries are a thing of the p—aahh!” The pickpocket gasped as Reece grabbed his wrist with a grip designed to incapacitate the victim’s hand. He caught the kid’s wallet before it hit floor and growled “back to the bilge, ya pack of rats.”
The rat on the kid’s right—a big dark-skinned fellow—eyed Reece up and down, taking in the service-issue revolver and shortsword. “This aint nonya. We was havin’ a chat.”
He tightened his grip on the pickpocket. “Ahh, ow! Ahh!” he whined. “That hurts! Let go!”
Reece kept his eyes locked on the big man and made sure the one that hadn’t moved yet was in his field of vision. He saw Mike the bartender reach under the bar.
“Fecking hee-ro,” the big man cursed. “Come on, Louis, Tyrell. They gotta bad smell here.”
Reece let go of Louis and made room for Tyrell to get off the stool and walk away. He watched as they slunk to a darkened corner table and muttered amongst themselves.
“Advice,” he grunted, throwing the kid’s wallet on the bar. “Put that in a front pocket. Your back and your bank account will thank you.”
“Thuh… thanks,” the kid squeaked. Reece froze in the act of taking the stool vacated by Tyrell. The kid was a girl! He sat and waved his mostly-empty beer at Mike, who had withdrawn his hands from what Reece assumed was the standard-issue bar shotgun.
He killed his beer and took at closer look at the girl. She had a backpack that was damn near big as she was, and sported an oversized toolbelt covered with instruments, tools, and gizmos. She wore an old leather pilot’s cap over her head, and had brand-new Dr. Gotraynes goggles hanging around her neck. He figured she must be some kind of student, but University Row was on the other side of the city.
She had blue, blue eyes. Her skin was pale, like what they called “white.” And was that a blonde hair sticking out from her cap? Reece mentally added “victim” and “brood-slaver target” to the “fresh meat” label she had attained already.
“What in the name of Republican Jesus are you doing here, kid?” He figured he should be blunt. Someone like this needed to be shocked into caution.
She jerked like she’d been slapped. “I… it’s a public place?” She was trying to sound tough but it came out awfully squeaky.
He chuckled and shook his head. He looked her square in her wide eyes. “This is a rough neighborhood,” he said slowly and clearly. “People get mugged and murdered in this area. Those three—“ he jerked his head to the rats in their corner—“would have stopped at just robbery if you were lucky.” He checked the bar mirror to see how many patrons were paying attention to them and saw it was just the three rats. “So what is it?” he asked, still looking in the mirror. “A dare from your schoolmates?” She looked even more pale and innocent in the mirror, sitting next to his roughened Standard self. An unnerving thought struck him, and he looked down at her face again. “You’re not a runaway, are you?”
She was fidgeting with her wallet, trying to find a pocket in the front of her kit that wasn’t already stuffed with junk. She blinked three times, openmouthed. “You--! I--! Hey! I’m not running from anything! And I’m not a student!” She opened her wallet and fished around in it. “At least, not since last Tuesday.”
“Since Tuesday? Didja get kicked out?”
“Hardly.” Talking about school seemed to put her in her own element. “I graduated,” she proclaimed, pulling a punchdoc out of her wallet and thrusting it at him.
“’University of Detroit, Full Doctorate Certificate,’” he read. He looked from the fancy embossed punchdoc to the girl and back again. “Looks official.”
She gave him the incredulous head-tilted stare that teenaged girls have been using since the beginning of indignance. “Of course it’s official, you bilge-head!”
He suppressed a smile. Bilge-head? “You’re awful young for a Doctor.”
She stiffened her back and managed to give the impression of looking down at him despite being a foot shorter. “Youngest ever,” she proclaimed. “In Detroit anyway. They had a seventeen year in Hellay.”
“You’re older than seventeen?”
She gave him a sullen teen look. “Eighteen.”
Eighteen. Holy Buddha-Christ. He was eighteen when he enlisted. What a dumb-sheeyeh farmboy he had been. His mother had wanted him to go to University but he’d known that was wishful thinking.
“What are you, some kinda girl genius?”
She grinned widely, showing rows of perfect white teeth. “According to the tests!”
He chuckled, without irony this time. The kid was infectious. He held out a calloused hand. “Bill Reece.”
“Emily Wilson,” she said, shaking his hand. He noted her hand was soft and covered with ink stains. “Or, as my cert proclaims; Doctor Eponymous.”
His brow wrinkled. “Eponymous?”
She swiveled her stool to face him completely, banging her oversized pack against the bar. “I know! Isn’t it the craziest name? It’s a complete reflection of my academic history!”
“…complete refl—“
“It’s because whatever I decided on for my doctorate, someone beat me to the punch on it! First I started a paper on Aether flux transmission but someone in Nashville had just finished one. Nashville! Can you believe? Then it was vacuum circuits and their application to propulsion but old Dwight Smith had started it a month before—like I wanted to fight Old Dwight? I tried semi-autonomy in clockwork vehicles—I mean, nobody has thought of that, right? Wrong! Harry Marvin from New Newyork was in the final stages. I really thought I had something unique there. Then it was brainwave phosphor—“
“Hey, kid.” Reece had felt his eyes glazing over after the word “paper.”
She gave a little cough. “Emily.”
“Emily. What does ‘eponymous’ mean?”
She blinked once, slowly. “Oh. Um. It’s when something references the name in a literary work… like, if someone wrote a book about you, you might say ‘the eponymous hero of “The Bill Reece Story,” in… uh, reference to you.”
He chewed on that for a moment. “So, why Doctor Eponymous?”
“Well you know how I was getting beaten to the punch by other students? People started calling whatever I worked on ‘Miss Wilson’s Aether Wilson Theory’ or ‘Wilson’s treatise on the Wilson Motion Equation.’ You know, because they wanted to differentiate from the inevitable discovery of someone else working on the idea…”
Inwardly, Reece shrugged. Maybe you had to be a genius to get it. “Sounds great, k—Emily. I never met a genius before, not to mention a kid-genius.”
She straightened her spine—no easy trick, with all that gear on her—and managed to look down her nose at him. “You’re humoring me.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “A little.”
“Hmph. What are you doing here? In this rough area? Waiting for naïve young graduates to imperil themselves?”
He frowned into his nearly-empty beer. “Looking for work.”
She cocked an eyebrow and her eyes narrowed. “What sort of work?”
“Piloting… something, I dunno. I got a thopter waitin’ to eat sky and as much as I like joyrides, they don’t punch my meal ticket, you know?”
Her eyes went wide. “You own an ornithopter? You’re a pilot?”
He looked up from his beer and saw her saucer eyes. “Yeah? What?”
“I came here looking for a pilot!” She was almost stage-whispering with excitement. “I need a flyer to help me prove a new theory!”
He scratched his head. “You need a pilot to help you with your wave-fluxing and field-motioning.”
She nodded, grinning.
“And you’ll pay.”
She nodded again. “Of course. The University provides a stipend for approved theoretical—“
“How much?”
“Oh, um… I’ve already bought all the equipment I need, so what I have left is…” She pulled out her wallet and began to fish out bills.
He put his hand on hers and pushed the wallet under the counter. “Put your wallet away, kid. Estimate how much.”
She looked up and to the right, forming calculations and searching memory. “About two thousand, I think.”
Buddha Christ! Two thousand! He could damn near buy another thopter with that. “Two thousand.” He laced his voice with disinterest and a touch of disbelief.
Her face fell. “Well there would be more, after the theory is proven. Another—uh… two thousand?”
Oh, now he was just taking advantage—unless the job was dangerous.
“Just what is this job, Doctor?”
She looked up at him from under her leather cap. “Promise you’ll hear me out. Don’t walk away.”
He leaned back and lost a lot of the potential guilt for taking advantage of a gullible mark. “I’m listening.”
She looked around furtively, then leaned in and said with a low voice, “I need to harvest some lightning.”
