It's a cold, hard town
The searing hot sting of a laser sliced through his shoulder like a Mercury sunrise--the planet not the drink. 'Pistol' Pete Derringer staggered against the hard, impersonal steel of the bar.
'A simple 'no' would suffice,' he said, dropping the alien hypercube into his pocket and reaching for his own sidearm.
The whiny drone of the synthetic barkeep repeatedly shouted 'no weapons'.
Pete dropped and rolled, taking aim as the hardwired Hotshot flew over the dirty, square tables of the SolarWind. Propelled by neurocybernetically enhanced quadriceps and powered by an internal micro-fusion array, it was more thing than man.
Landing on the tables it met three rounds of pulse-plasma from Pete's Colt .666 Rectifier. The high-energy globs seared a trio of holes in its chest, relaxing the subatomic particle fidelity where they passed. Atoms and molecules simply fell apart.
The Hotshot lifted its gun, paused and fell backward, crashing to the floor.
Pete climbed slowly to his feet, 'I'm too old for this phate,' he said, looking to the barkeep. Dropping a fiver on the bar, he stepped out into the cold, dark night and the unforgiving urban jungle of the asteroid city Eden.
