by Matt Wallace
Sending Goolie here was a risk all by itself. Adding in two Quyth Warriors? That meant bribes. That meant getting at least a few people to look the other way. Someone else wanted info on Quentin Barnes, someone with a lot of money, a lot of power.
And by now, those Warriors had reported back to their shamakath. Which meant, of course, that now Goolie and the Warriors would not only be looking for info on Barnes — they would be looking for Fred.
Fred had to stay on the job, that’s what Quentin had paid him for, but Fred knew that a dead man can’t find a damn thing. He had to lie low. He couldn’t afford to disappear, not with a job still to do, but there were other ways to stay out of sight.
Frederico Esteban Giuseppe Gonzaga had to become invisible.
II: GRIM TYRANT VALLEY
Chapter 7: Nathaniel Cornish Sr
He was registered at the Micovi Stadium Inn as Mr. Nathaniel Cornish Sr. Mr. Cornish was a marginally successful sales representative. For the whole of his career, he’d been employed by Magi Mining Supplies, Incorporated, one of the seemingly endless and wholly indistinguishable companies that hocked industrial machinery throughout Micovi and the other Purist Nation mining colonies. He was a deacon at his Church, a family man, polite but forgettable.
It was a good cover. Fred enjoyed Nathaniel’s accommodations. Considering, however, that Fred had very recently committed a major crime by breaking into the stadium less than a hundred yards from his junior suite, he felt it was time to change hotels. The laws on Mining Colony VI were barbaric by any civilized sentient’s standards. When you threw in the crew of dangerous-looking aliens he’d bumped up against during the job, and the fact that Goolie could finger him, staying a few steps ahead of the game wasn’t just smart, it was necessary.
Returning to the hotel at all probably wasn’t the most prudent move, but Fred needed to pick up his gear. He also didn’t like leaving loose ends. A guest disappearing without checking out — especially one who left behind a cache of high-end spy equipment — would raise flags and questions and leave a trail to be followed.
Back in his suite, Fred removed the air filtration vent, behind which he’d stashed his more sensitive luggage. He believed in two things when it came to the job: traveling light and never being under-equipped. Balancing the two edicts had taken years to perfect.
From inside the vent, he removed two cases, each small enough to fit in a coat pocket without a bulge. One case contained surveillance equipment, communications tools and data-recovery devices. It was all micro-technology, some of it standard and other pieces Fred had designed if not outright built himself. He was no hardware wiz, but he was a quick study.
The other case was Fred’s masquerade kit. Among the kit’s contents was a compressed tube of dermal reconstructive, an organic compound that adhered to and mimicked flesh. With it Fred could quickly and expertly create a different nose, make a more bulbous chin or even alter his cheekbones. He could create scars or other distinguishing features. And a little went a long way.
There was also a microfiber bodysuit that folded to the size of a handkerchief. Patches of it would hold rigid shapes and could be molded by current. It allowed Fred to change his body type in any one of a hundred ways.
Finally, a dye-and-cut kit for his hair, bags of extensions in case he needed a shaggier look and digital lenses that could make his eyes any color.
Fred’s military history gave him numerous skills that were vital in his line of work. His best skill, however — a genuine talent for disguise — had come from an entirely different place. As a teenager he’d participated in Church theater. He’d played saints, apostles, even the parts of women because women in the Purist Nation were not allowed to act. Fred had been a decent enough actor for lead parts, but he’d rarely played them; with a good costume and prosthetics, he could lose himself in a bit role. Fred never liked playing the lead — he loved being a character actor.
He’d had chances to move on to professional acting, but he’d never landed a gig. Fact was, he just wasn’t good enough. He didn’t have the talent to make it on the stage, but making a paying audience believe was far harder than making strangers think you were someone you were not. Audiences watched you — strangers usually did not.
It was funny how some things came full-circle. Had he been a better actor, he would have made a living at it. But he wasn’t good enough, which led him into the military. A military history led him into gun-work, gun-work led him into the private investigator business, and it was there that his skill of becoming a different person found a home.
Fred stowed the cases and retrieved the final items he’d hidden in the vent: his weapons. He preferred stealth on the job. He believed in avoiding conflict whenever possible. He was an investigator now, not a soldier. But his brush with Goolie and those Quyth Warriors during the stadium penetration had changed the rules of this one in a big way. That kind of opposition wouldn’t arrest him, they would murder him where he stood. And until Fred knew exactly who they were and what they wanted, he had to accept that as a possibility.
And he would have to stay well-heeled for the rest of this job.
He never traveled with firearms. They were too easily detected on ship or by port security. If you were caught with a gun, you talked to the Creterakian patrols — something he’d done once, and once was more than enough to ever want to do it again. If he needed a gun, he found one on-sight. Most of the time, though, he relied on more basic, more primitive methods.
His special forces service gave him the best training the Purist Nation armed forces had to offer. They’d schooled him in the blade and the baton, in hands and choke holds. And whatever PN training might have lacked, Fred had more than supplemented with real-world experience. His choice in weaponry on the job reflected that.
They were all custom implements. There was a blademaker back on Ionath, a Human of Spanish descent, a master and one of the few craftsmen of his race from whom the Quyth would buy weapons. His was a family trade, and he liked to brag that lineage went all the way back to master bladesmiths of Toledo, Earth, millennia ago. Fred had saved the Spaniard’s life once. It had been completely by accident, but Fred never revealed that secret. If it made the man happy to make Fred’s personal defense tools at no charge? Well, making people happy was a virtue. High One said so. And that made it true, right?
The Spaniard had built a unique shoulder holster exactly to Fred’s specifications. A set of matched blades ran up his flanks, the handle of each close to his armpits. The blades were forged from composite materials that would pass ninety-nine percent of the body scans out there. Fred could reach for either, or both, and it would seem like he was simply delving into his inside jacket pockets.
He pulled out the shoulder rig and slipped it on with practiced familiarity. Where the straps of the shoulder rig crisscrossed his upper back, another blade was deftly concealed, this one shorter and curved like the talon of some giant predatory bird. It was an ancient Earth design known as a kerambit, perfect for slashing, hooking and dragging your opponent down.
Fred wholeheartedly believed the old Human adage that preached, “Never bring a knife to a gun fight.” He also believed in shredding his enemies before they had a chance to draw their guns.
He packed his gear inside his regular travel bags, donned one of Mr. Cornish’s blazers, then left the junior suite. Fred checked out of Stadium Inn. He’d also planted a ghost ticket in the database of one of the midrange commercial transport lines that ran shuttles to and from Micovi. If anyone dug into Nathaniel’s whereabouts, they would find an ordinary trail that had him staying a few days in a nice hotel, then leaving Micovi via the same shuttle line on which he’d arrived. Tracking Nathaniel Cornish Sr. from there would be a time-consuming goose chase.
Fred downgraded to a prison cell-sized room at a cheap flophouse on the outskirts of the city. He ditched his Mr. Cornish Sr. persona and made up a name at random. No one here was going to ask for papers to back it up, anyway. The
desk clerk, half in the bag on black market spirits or chemicals or both, looked right through Fred when he checked in.
Once in the room, Fred finally called up the information gathered by his sniffer program. Quentin’s physical information and career stats were there, of course. Fred casually glanced at these, skipping over them except for one eye-popping set of numbers: at 16 years old, Quentin had been 6-foot-9, 365 pounds. Mister Sam’s business must have been good to feed a kid like that.
Fred filtered out everything related to football. That left very little. His work record from the mines showed dozens of disciplinary incidents for fighting. A big kid like that had been a target for people wanting to make a reputation for themselves. No pit fights — Quentin had been smarter than that, it seemed. That didn’t surprise Fred: no one seemed to understand just how smart Quentin was, including Quentin himself.
Fred filtered that out as well, focused on any criminal records. Quentin’s brother, Quincy, had been hanged for theft. The brother had been a couple years older; he possibly had more information if Fred could find a DNA record of the boy.
And then, Fred struck pay dirt. Because of Quincy’s crime, Quentin had to pay the criminal debt. This “legal recourse” was designed to create wage-slaves, people who owed so much they could never work it all off, but they had to work because they owed the money. The pay dirt? Fred found a reference to Quincy, all right, but it wasn’t Quincy Barnes.
Quentin’s brother’s name was Quincy Carbonaro.
“Well, I’ll be,” Fred said to himself. “They changed your name when you were little, so little you don’t even remember it. No wonder I can’t find anything on your family.”
That changed everything. Fred had a DNA sample of Quentin, taken from one of the quarterback’s many bloody bandages left on the practice field. If Fred could access Micovi’s central records database and cross-reference that DNA against the family name Carbonaro, maybe he could find something.
The discovery filled Fred with satisfaction. Straight-up detective work had produced a clue. He stretched his arms above his head, yawned, felt the exhaustion of the day’s efforts. Time for sleep.
He sliced open the bottom of the room’s sole chair. Inside his new hidey-hole, he stashed his work gear and his weapons. Once he was settled, Fred found he was bone tired and his muscles felt raw. The room had a grimy bathing stall. Fred ran the water as hot as it would get, which was scarcely a step above tepid, and stood under the faucet for a long time.
It felt good, even if it did little to soothe his body. He toweled off quickly and crashed on the room’s stiff cot of a bed. The mattress felt like it was trying to repel him, and the bed’s single pillow was like an empty burlap sack, but it wasn’t three minutes before Fred went out.
Chapter 8: The Mercenary
Upstairs the sounds of animal pleasure are a muffled, pig-grunting chorus that can’t be ignored.
Rico sits at the bar in the parlor of the bordello, weary of trying not to hear it, weary of being in this place, weary of the charade and of the life that surrounds it. He’s weary of his life, the one he’s made since leaving the service, since becoming an ex-commando bumming around the least-regulated rocks in the Purist Nation and beyond.
He has sat drinking with one of the working girls long after his fellows have all disappeared with their own escorts. When they were still downstairs huddled together around him, Rico laughed and shouted and catcalled in time with their drunken chorus. He’s quiet now. The girl is still talking, maybe trying to seduce him, maybe just prattling on. He’s stopped listening.
Instead, Rico watches her, studies her body, although not in any erotic sense. She has tattoos. Some are Church markings that have been blacked out or burnt with hot irons, leaving pigmented scars. Rico would guess the girl did the blacking out herself after someone else, maybe her father, took the iron to the rest.
As he looks at her, feeling nothing, he notices one of the tattoos draped over her collarbone is the Loa. It shouldn’t be there. When he started talking to her a half hour ago, she didn’t have a Loa tattoo. Yet there he is, skull-faced and perpetually tipping his stovepipe hat to all who looked on.
This old horror show, eh, cher? the Loa says jovially from the girl’s wasted flesh. Its ink-stain lips seem to struggle to move her skin, to form words — but Rico knows he’d hear those words loud and clear even if the Loa had no lips at all.
Rico would shrug at the creature if he had any control over this image of himself from the past, but he does not. He can only watch through the eyes of this shadow that was.
What’s the point of coming back to this memory? it asks. You loved no one here, no one loved you. This was just a stopover in your life, so why come back?
It’s true. Rico has been with the Red Moon Company for a little more than a month, and he already knows his career as a professional soldier won’t live out its rookie year. He despises everything about the mercenary life. He loathes the company he’s kept, the jobs his company has been hired to do and the places they have to go to do them. There’s no honor in this. No real purpose. And there’s no trust or fellowship. The drunken laughs and backslaps are always forced. Any one of these men he fights alongside would just as soon shoot him in the back for the right price.
Red Moon has been hired by the local magistrate to clean out a jet cycle gang called the Purest Steel. The Purest have been muscling in on the magistrate illicit businesses, such as the bordello over which the Red Moon mercs have been given free reign. Rico spent that day doing recon on the Purest’s clubhouse. The PS number less than fifty. He’s confident about wiping the entire gang from the landscape with a zero body count on the mercenary’s side.
Now that the rest of his fellow mercs — and what a sad phrase that is, that he has fellow mercs; because he takes a paycheck just like they do, he is one of them — have gone, Rico dismisses the girl. Left to his own thoughts, he hunches over the bar and makes a cigarette out of synthetic paper and black market tobacco. The tobacco is cut to the bone with High-One-knows-what, but it tastes like manure and smokes like a neck bone. Still, it occupies him. Its chemicals do their job.
Rico strikes a match and lights the handmade cigarette. The first drag is like breathing in a rubber fire. It stings his lungs and pains his head. By the fourth drag the effect dissipates.
Rather than extinguish the match, Rico holds it up to the parlor lights. He is staring at the flame burning below the scorched, blackened head of the match when it happens.
The force of the explosion extinguishes the flame. It also knocks Rico hard to the floor, as if he went down under the weight of the entire Ionath Krakens defensive line.
Above Rico, the entire ceiling had transformed into a floating carpet of fire. He curls into a tight, fetal ball as the second-floor debris rains down. Something hot and heavy hits his elbow, his hip. He feels his hair whoosh into flame. He quickly smothers it with his bare hands, losing several ounces of skin in the process.
Then, his right hand is on fire, soaked in a glove of flame, but he feels no pain. The skin blackens and chars like a steak dropped into glowing coals. He feels not pain – this part, at least, is not real.
The imaginary flame-glove winks out of existence. Time passes. Rico’s ears are ringing, and blood is trickling from them both. He expects the parlor to be consumed by fire, but it’s not. There are flaming patches here and there, but most of it has already burned itself out, leaving only blackened, decimated remains. The fire was just a side effect of the accelerant used in the explosive device, he’ll later learn. The concussive force of the blast is what did the most damage.
Rico staggers to his feet. He is dazed and off-balance, but there’s no pain... not yet. He can’t hear. The world around him has been silenced, turning it into something like a dream. His vision makes it shimmer. On instinct, Rico draws his pistol and brings it to bear, arms extended and palms pressed firmly together around it just as he was taught to do back in the service.
He heads for what’s left of the staircase. The Loa is perched gingerly on the banister. You don’t want to come up here, boy, it warns. Ain’t nothing you can do. It will only stir you up. What is here that you need to see again?
And, of course, Rico cannot heed the warning. He rushes past the Loa, stepping over smoldering debris, skipping the steps that were knocked out in the blast.
There’s more of the second floor left than he would have imagined. Many of the walls have been blown apart, but much of the framework remains intact. There is little order to what he sees — some pieces of furniture look almost untouched, while others lie in tattered, smoking piles. Rico bolts over the charred rubble, stumbling over unsure footing, his shoulders and arms singe anew as he bumps into charred corners and hanging bits of board.
He comes upon Waycross first, half-buried by debris in the hallway. The man’s legs have been torn away by the blast, one below the knee and one above. He might live, Rico thinks. He might get bionic replacements or even have new flesh grown to replace what he has lost. Then he sees the splinters, some as big and as thick as industrial nails, sticking between Waycross’s fingers as they clutch his neck. Those big hands are the only thing stemming the flow of arterial blood — stemming, not stopping. Waycross’s fresh stumps flail, his not-there-feet trying to balance him, help him stand. His bugged-out eyes are staring at nothing, or already looking into the great beyond.
There is nothing that can be done. Rico keeps moving.
Next he finds Bannon, the crew’s sharpshooter. Bannon seems largely undamaged, but he has as much life inside of him as a man-shaped doll. The blast hit him in a way to knock it right out of him. He looks surprised. The woman lying next to him seems much the same way, right down to the look on her face.