The Ballad of Bessie Bishop

[Big Bison Bessie]

The cardamine epidemic had taken a turn lately with the slave revolts on Planet Malta. The highly addictive drug peddled by the Outcasts had long ago sunk its fangs into the heart of Liberty, enticing and twisting the young, the vulnerable, the stressed, and the rich. It had crept its way across all walks of life. The narcotic was dangerously addictive, both psychologically and chemically. But now, supplies were starting to dwindle. The fields on Malta that grew the plants were desperate for new workers, and what little is being produced now is simply not enough for the demand.

The effects were felt down low on planets the most, in the gutters and the streets that ran thick with grime and oily runoff. Where desperate workers like those on planet Erie looked desperately for reprieve. Ryan Petrov was one such man who offered relief at a price. The tall and thin man often disappeared into the dark corners of alleys and dive bars, finding little shadows to crawl into and hide until those who knew about what he had to offer came calling. He blended right in with the disheveled and poorly shaved droves of workers and crew that wandered in from their shifts. This dark and cloudy night, he found a little booth near the back of a dive bar by the name of O’Driscoll’s down in the slums of Seneca colony, not far from the ramshackle city blocks the workers from the refinery called home. Tired men and women cycled in and out at a predictable pace as shifts ended, transports arrived with crews looking for shoreleave, and the local hooligans sought out entertainment. It was a dusty little place, dark and patched up and smelling of greasy food and cheap beer. The kind of place where old music hits played on repeat through an even older sound system that left everything with a vague, tinny quality to it. The ideal past it and its patrons clung to was a past viewed through a rose tinted telescope, distant and longed for, long since gone.

Slowly and quietly he made deals, people knew they could come to him and rely on him for the drug. But for how long, he admittedly wasn’t sure. His buddy, Marco, was due back from securing a shipment of cardamine tomorrow morning. If that panned out, he’d be in business for another few months. But, it was getting dry everywhere. He had been rationing and cutting his product more and more, and people were starting to notice. Dealers were starting to vanish. Sooner or later he might have to, too.

The musty little place was big enough, had a bar that can and did sit thirty or so workers looking for some liquid relief, and enough booths to let folks sit down and enjoy some cheap fried yellow-beaked rockhopper wings and fries and whatever else happened to be on the menu at the time. Ryan smiled to himself as he nursed a beer, a couple guys making their way over to his table, regulars he knew by name.
They came, they traded their money and he traded them a dead drop location with the drugs.
Then they were gone.

Such was his routine.

It was the slow approach of heavy footfalls that made him turn. Such a thing wasn’t unusual around here, but something made him realize this was different. Steady, moving with a purpose, they were the footfalls of someone with a steady intent roiling in the back of their mind. A buyer? A bounty hunter? A cop? A cop he bribed? A cop that wanted a bribe? He turned, and as he did, he heard a deep twangy voice he hadn’t heard in over fifteen years.

“Hell, you’re still alive, you dumb bastard?”

A woman stood tall before him, her thumbs hooked into her belt as she rested her considerable weight on one hip. It was that kind of sassy energy that bled up into her face as well. With her cocksure grin and wild dark auburn hair, and those piercing blue eyes, his own lit up in recognition. Ryan knew this dumb fat bitch, he could recognize her anywhere.

“Son of a bitch, if it ain’t Bessie Bishop!” He leapt up, nearly knocking the table over before slapping her on the ass with a smarmy smile. “I thought you were supposed to be in jail, you dumb whore!”

“Hell I ain’t in that line of work no more.” She leaned in for a big hug, a crushing one that knocked the wind out of the much smaller man. He gagged for mercy.

Bessie was a big gal, easily six foot two even with those hefty boots of hers on, maybe a hair over. And she was stronger than half the men Ryan knew, and she obviously kept on top of her weight lifting or whatever she had been doing while she was in prison, because she was still built like a truck. Hell her arm was nearly as thick as his own head, she could probably pick him up and toss through the table. With a hefty and gruff frame lined with muscles and pudge, it was easy to see why she’d earned the nickname ‘Bison’ in her old crew. She had earned herself a couple more scars that he recognized from her winning knife fights since she had been in jail, and had gained a chain tattoo around her left wrist. It was something that sat opposite of her larger Liberty Rogues’ skull and crossbones tattoo on her right arm.

But why was she here, now? Why wasn’t she still aboard LPI Sugarland doing work in the prison factory? It is a question that gnawed quietly in his mind as she handed him a beer and they both sat down, the side arm on her belt that he briefly saw lingered in his mind as a warning sign. He recognized it as an oversized Detroit 358 hand cannon, a big ass laser pistol styled up like a revolver. Greedy thing needed six micro-fusion cells. It was a serious gun. But that smile of hers layered her personality with enough charisma to push that to the back of his mind. She always liked things that went boom anyways after all.

“Petrov, you two-bit horse fucker, what are you doing all the way out here? Hell, what are you even doing alive?”

“Hey I gotta make a living.”

“What, are you whoring yourself out now?” She mocked him with an exaggerated kissing face.

“Oh, lord no, haha. Just, well, the usual I guess.”

The two of them summoned one of the wait staff with a couple snaps. The human servers were busy, so they sent an old, DSE build robot over to take their order. Bessie looked the thing up and down, seemingly amazed at how old it was judging from the mismatched parts and flaking paint on it. It was a fleeting note that passed, and the two ordered more beer and some food. Ryan grabbing some of the local fried fish, and Bessie ordering one of the burgers the place had on offer.

“What, did you piss off everyone on Rochester Base? Had to do business in this dump?”

“Hey, I did not piss off everyone on Rochester.”

“Bullshit. What about Andre?”

“He’s not a fan of how I cheated on him with his sister. Besides, he’s in jail.”

“Sure he is.” She stifled a laugh and took a long swig of beer. “You really are a horny bastard. Okay, how about Lucas?”

“He’s not on Rochester anymore as far as I could tell, dunno where he is, probably gambling his savings away.”

“Oh yeah? What about Sam?”

“He doesn’t want to see me after I crashed his Bulldog.”

“Wow, you really are a dumb bastard. Dumb horny bastard, here I thought I had a monopoly on that. What about Stevenson? Where’s that hotshot kid?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but the words didn’t leave his throat save for a sigh and half formed a gasp of a word. His mind dwelled quietly on the question as his mouth hung open.

“... shot dead by the LPI eight years ago…” He finally answered.

A pause, then a long sigh from them both.

“Damn.”

The food arrived unceremoniously not long after as the two looked through each other.
The salty smell of the fish and fries and the savory notes of that cloned beef mingled in the air with the stale beer smell and distant mix of miscellaneous odors coming from the kitchen that resembled the smell of cooking. They all suddenly felt so far away as the weight of the years started to rest upon the two of them properly. Memories stirred in Ryan’s mind, refreshed by Bessie’s presence. The two former pirates no doubt recalled similar key moments in their past lives. Though between all the raids and smuggling runs, one event stood out to Ryan the most. It was like a hot coal. He dwelled on it as they ate and drank to the grimey music in the grimey bar. It was an event he was sure to sting at Bessie like a needle in her side. It stuck in his brain like a splinter while he looked at her here and now. The sights and sounds and smells of that day returned to him like a dream.
About sixteen years ago, most of the gang was together, flying under the flag of the Liberty Rogues. They were a motley assortment of petty criminals, stealing, raiding transports and cargo depots, and overall being a nuisance for the law enforcement and corporate pilots throughout Liberty space. You could get away with a lot in Liberty space back then, still can now. The reach of the LPI and Navy only goes so far, and while the Bounty Hunters Guild crawled out of the woodwork at every turn, it was never enough to truly make an area safe from outlaws. There were entire swaths of the Texas and California systems that the Rogues had total control over. They were just one small gang amongst dozens.
They knew a hacker, a gross, pervy kid by the name of Cameron Cooper, who fed them information on transports coming through the lanes from time to time. Apparently he had caught wind of a couple of big Universal Shipping transports that were absolutely packed with shipments of brand new Kishiro brand optronic computers. State of the art, not on the market yet. They’d fence really nicely, and the boys at the Lane Hackers would always pay well for new computers and sensor equipment. So it was a juicy target with a promise of cash floating on the wind. They just needed guns, and their crew had more than enough heavy fighters to bully them into submission. It was the kind of job they’d done half a dozen times.

Of course it didn’t go well.

The first sign of trouble came when Cooper bailed on the squad of Rogues. Little bastard didn’t say a word, but he must have gotten wind of something bad heading their way. So while Sam and Lucas were bitching on the comms about Cooper making a run for it, Bessie and Andre were busy shutting down the lane. Though a juicy train wasn’t what came tumbling out of it when it finally was disabled. Four LPI armored freighters, two gunboats, and six fighters fell right into their laps, way too much firepower for their small pirate squadron.

Bessie and Andre were caught up in the initial fire fight, and the two of them together were able to cripple one of the armored transports and down a fighter. Andre’s ship got shot through the flank and busted up his powerplant, leaving his weapons dead. Bessie, Sam, Ryan, and Lucas tried to cover for him, but during that mess Bessie’s ship, the Coyote, got one of its engine pods sniped off it. The rest of the crew made a break for it, leaving her and Andre disabled near the North Dallas Debris Fields as the LPI swooped in. That was the last he saw of those two. As much as he hated bailing on them, it was a losing battle. One not worth dying over. He heard later that they both survived and were arrested. The notion of their death being on his hands seemingly scrubbed from his mind.

But here she was again. As if nothing had happened, which was far from the truth.

She let out a hot sigh after taking another swig of beer.

“Heh. I miss those dumb bastards.”

“Yeah.”

Their words hung quietly in the air for a moment, before she spoke again, her expression softening.

“I dun wanna impose, but, do you have a place I could stay tonight?”

“Heh, well, I got an apartment you can crash at. Just one bed though.”

“I think we’ll manage.”

They traded smiles. Ryan felt little butterflies in his stomach.

The sky had been threatening rain throughout the evening, but it never came. He’d been drinking more and more heavily through the night at her behest, but Bessie herself stopped. It was her who drove the two of them home. And the two of them rode through the dirty little town in his truck, the dim yellow lights of the street reflecting off the old buildings and ill maintained stores as they went. Neon lights blinked color into the darkness, beckoning forth those who had pocket change to spend on cigarettes and snack cakes. Things like the newest flavor of Synth Paste, or tempting them with calls of the distant shores of a vacation to a resort world owned by Orbital Spa and Cruise. The late night siren calls of such things passed them over without effect. They had their beer, their food, and their cigarettes. Their quiet drive back to his apartment was just that, quiet. Soon, their truck pulled into the parking garage, equally as old and run down feeling as the rest of the town. A large billboard for the recently rebranded Imperial Shipping sat across the street atop another building. It was the newest thing in the whole area, and it was an advertisement for a shipping company on the other side of the sector.
Red lights lined the tunnel in, bathing the car in stripes of bright red light until the tunnel opened up into a grimy open garage. Dozens of different cars and aerocars sat quietly in their parking spots as their truck pulled into a reserved space near the automated reception counter. There was no sign of an attendant, merely a trio of terminals and a shuttered window where an employee could be stationed. The place was dirty, trash dotted corners of the huge chamber between all the oil stains and discolored concrete, and it stank like old oil and burning plastic from defective engines that the residents were running down to the last few kilometers of usefulness. A pair of elevators and some stairs led into the inner apartment complex.

The doors dinged and slid open. Bessie took a huff of her cigarette as she stepped out into the dimly lit hall, the orange floors and beige walls no doubt at some point in the distant past evoked warm inviting feelings. Now they felt well used and borderline neglected. The well traveled carpet muted the footfalls of the two of them, and quickly they made their way to apartment 12-109, where Ryan had made his home for the last few years.

The notion of sharing a bed with Bessie made his mind rush from one idea to the next.

Ryan wasn’t sure what to expect, he admitted. Bessie had always been somewhat of a tease, knowing just how to push the buttons of everyone she knew for more than ten minutes. Part of him wondered, if somehow, maybe he had a shot at her? She had always been at Andre’s hip, but that was years ago. But would making a pass at her be pushing his luck, he wondered? His tired and drunk eyes drifted up and down her ample figure as she stepped into his place, tracing those generous curves of her’s down from her chest and towards her hips and rear where the tightness of her clothes accentuated her even more. His better judgment escaped from him like steam from a kettle as his carnal urges guided his thoughts to images of her naked in his bed.

Bessie leaned in, putting her weight on her shoulder on the doorframe. That same smug smile. It had an odd warmth to it that made Ryan smile too.

“W-what is it?”

“Well,” She sassily swayed her hips as she spoke. “What do you do for fun around here? Anything, hands on?”

“Oh, er, well I suppose, I could, uhh… we… ” His words drifted off as she produced a pair of hefty handcuffs, his mind suddenly simultaneously racing and emptying.

“Interested in some roleplay?”

“Oh, well, I uh-” His face burnt red as his drunken blood giddily stirred.

“Take your clothes off, and put these on.” She smiled and tossed the handcuffs onto his bed.

An awkward smile crossed his drunk lips.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he wanted it. Bessie was finally not being an asshole. Why wasn’t she being an asshole? The thought was fleeting, pushed aside, and snuffed out by drunken desires as his eyes once again settled on her chest. The well of warmth in his core spurred him on, and soon he found himself undressed on the bed as he played with the cuffs. Finally he got them on and clasped, something that made her mouth curl up into a wide and wild smile.

“You’ve been a bad criminal, you know?”

Slowly she sauntered up as his drunken grin grew and grew, and with that confident swagger, she leaned in to kiss him. Breath left his body, expectantly, as he waited. Then she grabbed his hair and pulled hard, dragging his head and scalp back with a painful yank that made him gag. Bessie was always into rough stuff, and Ryan did love a woman who could kick his ass. But his yelp of eagerness was snuffed out by something cold and metal being pressed into the soft spot under his jaw, and even before glancing down he knew it was her hand cannon. Bessie’s grin grew into a near manic smile, a wild catharsis shown in her eyes like daggers. Like she won some game. Suddenly this felt a lot less fun.

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☆The Ballad of Bessie Bishop☆ | ☆Elizabeth Bishop LPI Records☆ | ☆Feedback☆