Garage Door Gangs

    She knows she paints a nice picture, her massive assault rifle strapped snugly along her spine, leaning back in the dramatic blue side-lighting of her favorite juice joint, The Dirty Grus. The walls are all made of metal and glass garage doors, a new fashion. She’s sitting at a table with a soft inner-worlder who thinks he can tangle on Metis. In Jack City, the capitol. She knows her long bare legs, her steel-tipped commando boots, her bulky, low-slung belt, and her little vest filled to the brim with high-freq recharges makes her look threatening and alluring. It’s the combination that always makes them twitchy.
 “Metis IV is one of them planets in the twilight, you know?” She starts lazily, swirling the head off the top of her brew. “Between the inner and outer spheres. Half-core, half-peripheral. Swanky and skuzzy. Halfwise orderly and half-ways lawless.”
Her current assignment/dealer (prey) looks smug. Felix Rama, some cocky rich boy from someplace tame, someplace central: Zohpos or something. Pressed suit. Latest brain-implant gear. Overly-done eyebrows. Thinks he’s better than her. (That won’t last long.) The plan is to intimidate him into lowering his prices and staying loyal to the Cairo.
 “The tourists love the capitol, course. The tourists, they think it’s a  freeride town where anything goes and everybody live on powder and juice.” Rama is nodding at her. “And seem like that’s true, for the first few weeks, don’t it?"
“I never have a problem,” Rama says.
 She smiles. People are usually afraid of her smiles. “But really, this just a mob-run planet. You know that, don’t you, Felix? You stay in Jack City long enough, you either get with a gang or you die.”
His face pales but he’s still smirking.
“Boy, you din’t even know which  territory you crossed through this morning, you idiot. Din’t even know we was all watching you.  We police better than the goo.”