“Stealing my docking penalty?” Shipyard Director Vane barked, his crimson sable coat flaring as he strode to the front of his thirty armed security guards.
With one vicious backhand, Vane slapped Xing Yao’s battered diagnostic tablet out of her fingers. The slate hit the titanium grate with a loud crack, skittering toward the edge of Pier #44.
“Strip her cybernetic eyes right now to pay her dead father’s fifty-million-AMC chart debt!” Vane ordered, pointing a silver-ringed finger at the girl’s face. “And throw this half-mech beggar into the hull-scraping pits!”
Two burly security guards in black power-armor stepped forward. One pulled a pair of magnetic bone-pliers from his belt, reaching straight for the sparking brass rings around Xing Yao’s eyes.
Xing Yao gasped and stumbled back against the gangplank railing. Her left optical lens buzzed wildly, throwing tiny green sparks as her mechanical fingers tried to shield her face.
Before the guard’s gauntlet could come within a foot of her collar, a warm hand caught Xing Yao’s trembling mechanical wrist and gently pulled her behind a plain black jacket.
Lin Mo stood between the girl and the thirty plasma-halberds.
“Hold on,” Lin Mo said, his tone as calm as if he were ordering soy milk at a street stall. “Did you just say her dead father owes fifty million Astral Merit Coins for star-charts?”
