Jack of Harts

I remember one day the girls were hand delivering some new toys to me in the middle of the Hyades Cluster when a Shang fleet faded in around us. They had us dead to rights. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of it. Then Rosalie and Rosalind opened up a channel and spoke the chemical building blocks of a bioweapon that could kill every Shang in the galaxy while leaving every other human being alone. They followed that with the antidote and a simple, “We don’t want to kill you. We just want to survive you.” I thought the Shang were gonna just nuke us all right there, just to shut us up. Then they turned and left. No shots. No words. Just gone. They never did that. They never ran without firing a shot. A part of me still wonders if I imagined that.

Once the cybers started getting Privateers to each of us Cowboys, Rosalie and Rosalind turned their ship into an even bigger flying gengineering lab than their starfighters. They gathered some of the best gengineers in all the worlds, and did things nobody could imagine. Who’s Bingo card had living bullets for our revolvers? We got them. The really weird part was petting them so they would bond with us and not eat our limbs off if they got frisky. Those were normal compared to some stuff they came up with. I could not explain most of their toys if I wanted to. And half of me still thinks I dreamed some of the weirder stuff up. Confetti and applause when I nailed a headshot? That’s just crazy. Right?

The Shang have strict laws on genetic manipulation that we absolutely do not follow, and Rosalie and Rosalind were simply one example of all the things we do that put the fear of God into the Shang. Those girls gengineered so many toys that did so many things that the Shang put them on the top ten bioterrorists list. I can’t tell you how many times they tried to kill those two girls. Traps. Overwhelming offenses. Poisons. Bounties. You name it, they tried it over the years. They wanted those girls dead and gone and no longer a threat to the Shang’s galaxy. I can understand that to a point. Intellectually. But personally? Those were my girls they were trying to kill. My best friends. I did not take kindly to that.