Let's Be Bad Guys Read online

  by

  Zachariah Dracoulis

  Let’s Be Bad Guys Copyright © 2021 by Zachariah Dracoulis. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by The Spritely Faun

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For lasagna,

  Awesome, delicious spaghetti cake

  CHAPTER 1

  O range light poured through the slit metal windows of my companion and I’s small quarters, the heavy air creeping through weighing on our already labored breathing.

  The well-worn metal bedframe threatened to give way under P’riti and my weight as the blue skinned Bortian moaned into the pillow she’d chosen to bury her face in.

  No amount of squeaking and creaking was going to slow us down though, my body unwilling to listen to reason as the Bortian pushed her freckled ass against me with each of my thrusts.

  ‘Thrusts’, heh, ‘lunges’ more like.

  Being up on the mattress with her had proven to take enough of the strain off my tired knees to give me a second wind in our hour-long romp though, and that had of course led to me upping the power to an almost violent level.

  Not that P’riti minded.

  I want to say she was bordering on orgasm number three, maybe four? I don’t know, I was so hopped up on Nuke Fuel and adrenaline that time had lost all meaning and I was liable to take a swing at the next guy who looked at me funny.

  Or in a way I thought was funny.

  Or any way really.

  What the fuck was he looking at anyway? Smiling at me like some kind of psycho.

  I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I was having a hard time balancing my horniness and aggression, an obvious side effect of the Nuke Fuel.

  On the plus side, sweat was rolling down my forehead and I could only force myself to think of something else so many times before I had to accept the inevitable.

  I was about to finish.

  “Done yet?” I practically growled through my teeth, prompting P’riti to look over her shoulder with an exhausted smirk, whipping a few flyaway strands of her fiery orange hair out of her eyes.

  “I didn’t hear no… bell.” P’riti whimpered as confidently as she could manage, her eyes fluttering shut and her head dropping back to the pillow as she evidently inched nearer to yet another orgasm.

  The cocky part of me wanted to push for more, see if I could turn our last night on Erelio into something for the record books, but my body had other plans.

  Unable to hold my cool any longer, I began to let out my faltering breaths as P’riti’s leg tremored against mine, her pussy compressing around my cock while she grabbed fistfuls of the sheets, my heart fighting my lungs in some sort of organ beatbox off.

  And just like that, P’riti was done, her whole body falling limp with relaxation as I did what I could not to collapse on top of her as I too finished, cumming with a force unknown to me up until that moment as a cheerful little notification appeared above my lover’s head reading ‘+50XP SEXPERIENCE’.

  “That…” P’riti trailed off as I pulled out of her and less-than-ceremoniously flopped onto the bed with a hefty, creaky squeak, “was amazing…”

  “I try,” I groaned in my smartass way, barely able to keep my eyes open while P’riti struggled to do much more than flop forward a little more, “so, you finish?”

  “Ha!” P’riti huffed before keeling over onto her left side, “I was starting to wonder if you’d gone and got yourself a pneumatic cyberdick.”

  “You wound me.” I chuckled, rolling onto my back and blindly reaching over for my CredCard on the nightstand, almost knocking my revolver off in the process, before finally getting ahold of the holographic ID card and holding it above me, “‘Captain Bartholomew Vexi Duke’. Has a nice ring to it, huh?”

  “‘Captain Barty D’…” P’riti remarked semi-consciously while I stared at my emotionless 3D model on the card, the white patches in my trimmed beard and hair aging me well beyond my years, before flipping it and reading the details on the back, “Well, there’re certainly worse names to have.”

  Cpt. Bartholomew Vexi Duke

  LEVEL

  1

  EXPERIENCE

  150/1000

  SKILL POINTS

  -

  LEVEL TITLE

  Greenhorn

  ACTIVE SPEC

  Spacefarer

  ALLIANCE/CLAN

  -

  REPUTATION

  Neutral

  REP TITLE

  -

  WALLET (Bits)

  B 875

  BOUNTY (Bits)

  B 0

  “You’re a riot,” I replied before tossing the card back onto the nightstand, “you should go get yourself cleaned up. Big night ahead of us.”

  “Only if you’ll join me.” P’riti said with a smile, not bothering to so much as open her eyes.

  “Of course,” I sighed happily, looking once again at the sufficiently satisfied Bortian, “you get started though, I need a minute to regain feeling in my legs.”

  “You need a minute?” P’riti scoffed after she’d rolled off the bed onto her uneasy feet, “It’ll take me hours to get my legs back.”

  “Assisted gravity’ll hold your hand the whole way soon enough, P’riti,” I replied, lifting myself up onto my elbows as she walked around the end of the bed, “might even get in some zero g-”

  “No more sex until at least tomorrow,” P’riti interjected, stopping in the bathroom doorway, “head maybe, but I need to recuperate.”

  “Works for me.” I said with a grin as P’riti finally slipped into our small bathroom for what would be the last time.

  I want to say there was some part of me that felt like I was going to miss that vermin-infested, junkie-filled shithole, but I feel like lying this early on would set a bad precedent.

  Nah, I was more than happy to leave that little chunk of rock spinning off into parts unknown, especially that Godforsaken mine, and I wasn’t afraid of who knew it.

  After all, wasn’t like I planned on ever going back.

  CHAPTER 2

  Having decided to shave out of enthusiastic anxiety and, let’s be honest, self-consciousness about my early grays, I was forced to look in the steamy mirror for quite some time and acknowledge I’d made a horrible mistake.

  Not only was I dealing with the disconcerting fact that I looked like a stranger, I was also damn near certain I’d struggle to convince Dutan I meant business and wasn’t some damn yuppie.

  “Quit your frettin’,” P’riti said as she came to hug me from behind, looking around me at the mirror as she did, “couple weeks out exploring the stars and you’ll be my scruffy man again.”

  “I ain’t fretting,” I lied, turning to smile at the dressed P’riti, “just… reflecting.”

  “If you say so, cutie pie.” P’riti replied with an exaggerated eye roll before turning around and leaving the bathroom.

  “Sure you want to wear that?” I asked, nodding to her stretched out red tank top, “Aren’t worried we’re going to make the wrong impression?”

  “The shorts?” P’riti said while making a show of bending over to pick up her thigh holsters, her white panties peaking past the thin strip of fabric that could easily turn her shorts into a cargo micro skirt, “I think t
hey look great.”

  “I was talking about the shirt,” I clarified after tilting my head and nodding approvingly as P’riti slowly straightened back up, “to say nothing else, it looks like it’ll get caught on everything.”

  “Trust me, it’s fine,” P’riti assured me, “besides, what’s it matter if we make a bad impression? Dutan’s going to give us the ship because we’re going to give him the money for the ship. End of story.”

  “I know, it’s just that…” I muttered as I adjusted my leather chest holster over my slightly bunched up white t-shirt, “What if he takes a look at us and decides he doesn’t want to deal?”

  “Then we shoot him,” P’riti replied with a shrug, tightening her boot laces as she did, “like we said before, we aren’t exactly planning on going out into the great unknown with the intention of making friends.”

  “There’s playing by our own rules, then there’s shooting our ship merchant,” I chuckled, “you raise a valid point though, and, let’s face it, it’s not like he’s shifting a whole lot of product anyway.”

  “Exactly,” P’riti said before giving me a peck on the cheek while I looked around to make sure we weren’t forgetting anything, “the man makes a business out of scrap and selling ships, and most of the folk around here aren’t in a position to buy any of what he’s selling.”

  “Yet another good point,” I remarked with a sigh, accepting there was truly nothing left to do but go and meet Dutan, “you ready to go?”

  “Hold on,” P’riti replied, taking the two steps it took to cross to the kitchen in our small space, “I want to see if I have any more Nuke Fuel in the fridge.”

  “That stuff’s going to give us kidney stones,” I said with a smirk, leaning against the wall and feeling the buckles on my holster chip some more of the paint away, “you know that, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” P’riti muttered dismissively as she pulled out the final two cans of the powerful energy drink and tossed one to me, “we need to be alert though, and unless we can go back in time and not have sex for the past two hours…”

  “I get it.” I replied, doing my best to seem a little disappointed before cracking open the can with one finger and going to work downing it in a single hit, “Ah… Hot fuckin’ damn, that’s good.”

  “That it is…” P’riti trailed off after finishing her drink, crushing the can, and tossing it on the bed, “Well, guess it’s time we got moving.”

  “Guess it is, huh?” I agreed as the small ‘Over Energized’ popup faded away, “Stuff’s on the ship, money’s at the drop, and Dutan’s waiting on us… Any part of you going to miss-”

  “Not in the slightest,” P’riti interjected, leading the way to the door, “I thought I might in these final few moments, but nope, let’s just get the Hell out of here.”

  “Thank fuck for that.” I said more to myself than P’riti, following the eager Bortian out the door into the afternoon light, the stench of the nearby mine briefly triggering some sort of response that made me think I was late for work.

  That’s how P’riti and I’d met a few months prior, working in the pardonium mines, almost ended with me in jail too.

  Not because of something between us, mind you, between me and another fella who thought it’d be funny to give the new ‘alien’ girl some shit, eventually escalating to him messing with her tools and such.

  Well, I suppose more accurately it escalated to him having an industrial accident involving me, a shovel, and a good solid drop.

  He lived, thankfully, and none of us particularly wanted corporate police poking around down there, so in the end the only thing to come out of the whole incident was a surprisingly passionate relationship and me getting the nickname of ‘Shovel’ for a couple weeks.

  Speaking of…

  CHAPTER 3

  “Shovel and P’riti!” Carmine, the guy we loved to hate, exclaimed well before was appropriate as we approached the front of Dutan’s scrapyard, “Hey, twinsies!”

  “For fuck’s sake…” P’riti murmured once she realized he was referencing their red shirts, “Should’ve picked a different shirt.”

  “At least he’s not calling you fuckin’ ‘Shovel’,” I said out the corner of my mouth, barely hiding my amused smirk, “besides, maybe close proximity and lack of social contact will make his clinginess tolerable.”

  “I know we needed the money,” P’riti sighed while Carmine went on pointing out the shirts, “but couldn’t we have just, y’know, sold organs?”

  “Now you suggest that.” I joked as we finally got close enough that he could hear us and give me a ‘JOHN CARMINE has joined your party’ popup, “How long you been waiting, Carmine?”

  “Couple hours, not too long,” Carmine replied reassuringly, leading the way into the scrapyard, “one of Dutan’s goons told me I wasn’t allowed inside ‘til y’all showed up’s the only reason I didn’t get the ball rolling.”

  “You get a look at the ship?” I asked, my time in the Emperor’s Legion keeping me from focusing on much more than the towering piles of scrap and the dozen potential positions of a devastating ambush.

  “Nah, figured we should see it together,” Carmine explained, “from the way Dutan talked last night, she’s a solid bird though. Repairs apparently came a good deal under budget.”

  “A discount from Dodgy Dutan?” P’riti scoffed, “Seems totally in character for him.”

  “Or he wants us to smuggle something to the other side of the system,” I suggested, “man’s many things, but he ain’t stupid.”

  “Eh…” P’riti trailed off amusedly, “Anyway, you’re probably right. Guess I just feel a bit vulnerable after ReSpec.”

  “You kidding? May as well have a magical shield.” Carmine laughed, “If I’m being honest, being level one again is beyond relieving. Ain’t felt this safe in a long time.”

  “At this point, I’d just start working on your personality.” I added, laughing off the awkward silence as Dutan’s shipping container office came into view in a clearing, “You packing?”

  “Always,” Carmine replied confidently before discretely showing me the baby’s first blaster he had tucked into his waistband, “think there’ll be trouble?”

  “Always.” I said with a smile and a wave to the heavyset Dutan as he and his gorgeous bodyguard came out of the container, a shotgun in one hand and a shovel in the other.

  I should explain.

  See, Beth was P’riti and I’s original pick for a third.

  The fact that she was human would’ve helped to balance the ratios for some of the less-than-welcoming starports out there, and the fact that she was five-and-a-half foot of redheaded sexiness that had rolled around in the hay with us made her a shoo-in.

  Only problem was that she’d decided to ReSpec as a Soldier and hired herself out to Dutan a few weeks prior for reasons unknown, actively avoiding us once she had.

  I’d been convinced P’riti had decided she wanted to go monogamous and made it clear Beth needed to stay away, but pretty soon it became clear she was just as, if not more upset that we’d lost our playmate.

  Long story short, we had to go with a second, slightly richer but significantly less appealing choice

  “Was wondering when you two were going to show up,” Dutan remarked amusedly, pulling his belt up over his beer gut, “was starting to think you’d pulled a prank on Carmine here.”

  “‘Fraid not.” I chuckled as I went to connect an uncharacteristic high-five with the stocky Dutan, somehow missing entirely and slapping him in the face, “Shit, you alright? Sorry.”

  “All good,” Dutan replied with a pained smile, rubbing his bright red cheek while Beth regarded him with obvious confusion, “my fault.”

  “You sure?” I asked, barely registering the ‘Challenged DUTAN MURRAY’s party – Cooldown 4:56’ as it faded away.

  “Don’t worry,” Dutan said, waving me off, “ain’t about to let my misguided and failed attempt at seeming ‘with it’ to ruin a
good deal.”

  Pleasantly surprised at his coolness with the fumble, to the point where I almost went to offer him more money, I decided the best thing was to accept that he was embarrassed and move on.

  “As long as you’re sure,” I seethed with a barely reassured smile, unable to look away from the slap mark, “you get our stuff?”

  “All loaded up and ready to go,” Dutan replied before jutting his chin out towards the junkyard, “want to have a look for yourself ‘fore we head out and grab that down payment?”

  “We trust you,” I chuckled, pointing my head over to a path to our right and starting off towards it, “bits’re this way.”

  Understandably confused, Dutan and Beth followed with P’riti and Carmine coming up the rear as we’d discussed the day before.

  We’d had no intention of ripping Dutan off, but it seemed smarter to have him in a position where it’d be hard to get away from us should we get ambushed.

  As an added secret bonus, it got some distance between Carmine and me, keeping me happy and increasing his chances of me not shooting him.

  Win-win.

  Anyway, it only took about thirty seconds for us to make our way to where P’riti and I had hidden the loot, the dirt around the base of a particularly ravaged truck still loose from when we’d buried it two days before.

  “Clever,” Dutan praised surprisingly genuinely from a few feet behind me as I took the shovel off Beth and got to work, “how’d you get in the yard without anyone noticing?”

  “Like you said, Dutan,” I replied with a cocky smile, dumping the second and last shovel load in a neat pile next to the hole, “I’m clever.”

  “S’pose you are,” Dutan agreed while I picked up and dusted off the small tan hard case, “gullible as fuck though.”

  “Excuse me?” I scoffed as I turned to face Dutan, a devilish smirk across his face and a small blaster at his hip aimed directly at my head.