Well, this wasn’t anything that someone who was merely holding a grudge against the Boggart could pull off. It was one thing to have an APB out on him for kidnapping someone who wasn’t quite kidnapped. It was quite another to put out word that he was toxic that reached all the way down to every level—and have it believed enough that his sources wouldn’t even touch base to say they knew nothing. Or it could be worse than that; maybe some of them didn’t call back because they couldn’t; mighty hard to pick up your phone when you’re dead.
“We’ve got big trouble, dollface,” he ruminated, as Lori watched him with a gaze that had gone from seductive to worried as each call came in. “This is either big corporate, or big crime. Or both, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. That’s people that can spend more than you and I will see in a hundred years on five minutes of organizing.” His eyes turned to Harry. “In fact, it’s probably more than his mommy’s company will ever see in a hundred years, and that just doesn’t add up. I can’t figure how you’d be worth the cost and trouble for all of this. No offense.”
Harry spread his hands and grinned magnanimously before taking another sip of his refreshed martini.
Humph’s comm unit chirped again. More bad news. It was an unlisted line. Most of his contacts—even the legitimate ones—made use of burner comm units with reusable lines; that way he would know who it was, but it’d be a lot harder for anyone that was paying attention to find out who was calling. He picked it up after a few beeps. “Hello?”
“Hi there, Boggie. I’m going to screw your head off and play golf with your spine for all the trouble you’ve caused me, you know.”
Humph blinked hard as recognition set in. “Claire?” Relief washed over him; she had been in the back of his mind ever since he got the first returned call, and the implications of someone not getting back to him had become clear. To be honest…no matter how his head felt about her, down in the emotions sector, he’d been worried sick about her. Sure, she was pretty well protected by her hive on that station of hers…but it wasn’t that hard for a Norm hit squad to take out a Fang. Especially the kind that had the sort of money that allowed you to build an entry-pod, hide it in the bay of a freighter, pop out when you were docked, go straight to the section of the station you wanted to hit, cut an entry port and dump the squad right in the target’s office.
“Yes, it’s me, you bastard. What have you done this time?” Humph caught Lori’s expression; whatever she was reading in his face, she was not happy about it. In fact, her expression looked a lot like jealousy.
“Not much. Shot a bunch of goons, saved a blue-blood playboy from getting a permanent haircut at the shoulder range, and I’ve been accused of kidnapping the same.”
“Ha fucking ha. Really, what did you do?”
He explained the situation to her from the beginning; the job from Bevins, the hotel, his partners going missing and his office being ransacked, and being on the run. Claire took a few seconds to process everything once he was done. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re telling me, sister. Only thing I can figure it for is a rival corporation or some big shot criminal enterprise. Problem is, I can’t finger anyone who would fit the bill.”
“It can’t be either one of those. Boggie, I’m on the goddamned lam.”
It was his turn to be stunned. “What?” Claire had serious backing, probably more than any other person that he knew. Her operation had grown in the few years since he’d last seen her; the Elders were grooming her for proper leadership, since she was bringing in real money now with all of her ventures. The Elder Fangs pulled a lot of weight; plans and schemes and machinations that stretched into the century range to see the result, information networks that rivaled those of governments, and more money than God. Could they be behind this? The implications made his stomach lurch hard a few degrees to port. It didn’t seem likely; he didn’t know if he felt that way because of the scarcity of evidence of if it was because he simply didn’t want to believe that this whole mess was that far-reaching.
“I got your message a few days ago. I put it off since I was busy. A pesky business rival needed some re-education; a girl has to have her hobbies, after all. Anyways, once I got back to my station, I started digging into your little problem from what scant information you provided me. A few hours later, everything went straight into Hell’s own crapper; we lost our communications, my accounts were frozen, and then the station was attacked! I barely made it out in one piece; as far as I know, no one else did. I’ve been on the dodge ever since.”
“Holy hell, Claire. If I had known—”
“Damn right if you had known! Whatever fucking trouble you’re in, I’m in now too. I’m telling you, Boggie, I don’t want any part of it! At first I thought it was one of the other Clans making a move; it wasn’t. This was different, at least outwardly; whoever is doing this is well trained, well funded, and going after anyone and anything with a connection to you. They’re burning all of your bridges and trying to run you to ground, Boggie.”
His mind was swimming with all of this new information, trying to process it. “Look, Claire, tell me where you are. We can figure this out—”
“Stop right there. I’m on the run, and I’m staying that way until this is over, Boggie. I’m not going to be the grist for the mill in this goddamned escapade of yours. I took a big enough chance just calling you, and I only did that to see if you knew anything that could help me. Fat lot of good it did me. Whatever shit you got yourself into, you can get yourself out of. Good luck.” With that she closed the connection. And if she was smart—which she was—she ditched the comm she’d just made the call with somewhere in deep space, before course-correcting for a tangential trajectory. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that he had heard just a trace of concern. He could have just as well been imagining it.
Well. That was…festive. “Huh.” So Claire was on the run; whoever was after him was making sure that he had no one to turn to and nowhere safe to hide. This was beginning to look and feel a lot bigger than he thought even five minutes ago. But who could have the juice to pull all of this off, and stay in the shadows while they were doing it?
“Well?” Lori was sitting on the bed next to Harry now, her arms crossed in front of her chest and her expression icy. “What did she have to say?”
“That someone shut down and attacked her station right after she started poking at our anthill. She’s a Fang Hive Mistress and until a few hours ago she owned a deep-space station. So you tell me what that means.” Humph hadn’t intended to be quite so point-blank—except that if Lori was going to get all pissy over another woman, that needed to be burnt off at the root, right now. They didn’t have any time for that sort of thing; this was a survival situation. “Harry, do you have any idea who could pull all of this off? It can’t be your mother or the company, can it?”
Harry shook his head, his brow screwed up in concentration. “I really can’t, Humph. We’re just a cosmetics company; we’ve got our rivals, sure, but no one who would have the sort of scratch to go to these lengths to just rub me out.” He rubbed the back of his neck, then grinned. “I mean, I am pretty awesome when you get down to it, but it’s not like I’m vital to the company or anything. Bumping me off wouldn’t hurt things with our board; hell, some of our investors might even throw a party. Especially ol’ what’s her name…never did forgive me for that trip to Mars with her daughter…” He snorted. “And never would believe me when I said it was Brittany’s idea.”
Lori stood up; her arms were still crossed defensively across her chest, but at least she didn’t look like someone had just kicked her dog. Actually she looked scared. “Paulie never let slip who had leaned on him; he didn’t really share much information with the hired help. I can’t really think of who it would be myself; I’m not exactly an experienced member of the criminal underground, after all.” She looked back and forth between Harry and Humph. “Well? What do we do now?”
There was a ver
y loud bang from the front of the flophouse, where the check-in desk was. They were all startled by the sound, but Humph immediately knew what it was. Breaching charges. How could they have found us, again? Scratch that. How could they have found us so soon? He immediately set to work, gathering up the essentials, kicking Harry in the ass, and pushing both Harry and Lori toward the door. There were more explosions; flashbangs, then gunshots. Whoever was raiding this place, they weren’t interested in taking prisoners. The rest of the residents of the flophouse had the same idea as Humph and company: Get the hell out of Dodge. The hallway was packed with screaming beings, Para and Norm alike. Humph was in the rear, with Harry between him and Lori. Everyone was tripping over each other, stampeding toward the back door. Humph and his crew were by no means the only ones with reasons to run from the law in this joint.
After a lot of noise, elbows, and stepped-on toes, they were out the back door and into the cool night air with the first lot of escapees from the flophouse to fight their way into the open. They didn’t so much stumble out as tumble out, barely managing to stay upright. Humph had taken the precaution of keeping them a little back, so they didn’t run straight into the arms of whatever dragnet had been set up outside all of the exits. Floodlights came on within seconds of them emerging from the building, blinding everyone. The gunfire started almost immediately after, cutting down the first rank of people in front of them. Humph shoved Lori and Harry hard to the right, diving after them. He felt something akin to a heavy punch hit his left side, followed by searing pain. They all landed in a pile, behind what looked like a burnt-out transport. Everyone from the flophouse was still piling out, being pushed from behind by the raid team right into the gunfire. There was a lot of screaming; the hot, thick scent of blood that wasn’t his hit his nose. Right on top of that was the burned-pork reek of lethal laser-wounds. It was a slaughter. No warning, no demand for surrender or quarter given; this was a sweeper team, and they were going to kill everyone that they saw. They might not even be human. Bots were not supposed to be armed, ever, but everyone knew that, just as Asimov’s Third Law was an old joke, anyone with enough money could shrug off the fine if he was found with a garage full of war bots.
“We’re pinned down,” Humph gasped out. The pain was working its way up his side; he glanced down and saw that he was definitely bleeding freely. It was a gunshot, not a laser blast; if he had been tagged by a laser, there’d be less blood and a hell of a lot more pain. At least there was that; no major organs had been hit either, but he was still going to have problems if they didn’t get out of here and stop the bleeding soon. He probed the wound, felt the pocket torn through, and panic shot through him; his pocket watch was gone. It must’ve been shot away. If he couldn’t find it, he was dead. As a Boggart, he was tied to it; he couldn’t go too far away from it, otherwise he’d be instantly transported back to it. He felt himself getting dizzy; he staunched his wound with his hand, mumbling about his watch and needing to punch a way out. Lori shouted something to Harry; all sound except the screams of the dying and the gunfire was starting to fade out.
Things were going dark around the edges of his vision; Humph knew he was going to pass out soon. Lori had disappeared. Had she left them? Had she ever been with them in the first place? Harry was shouting something, trying to keep him awake. Then his face swam in front of Humph’s vision; Harry was smiling, flashing his perfect teeth. How could he be smiling? How dare the little punk smile? Harry patted Humph on the shoulder, and then ran into the kill zone. He jumped over bodies, bullets kicking up flecks of concrete and dust all around his feet, impacting all of the surfaces around him as he made his mad dash. He stopped right in the center of everything; there were still a couple dozen people scrambling to find cover before being cut down. Harry calmly bent down, picked something off the ground, and then ran back to where Humph was propped up against the burnt vehicle. The bastard was still smiling.
“Hey, you dropped this, partner.” Humph stared at him incredulously for a few seconds before he looked at what Harry was holding up: Humph’s pocket watch, smeared with a little bit of blood but otherwise intact. “Every man needs to keep a good watch.” Humph blinked for a few seconds, took the watch, pocketed it, and then promptly passed out.
***
The Boggart woke up in stages. At first he could only register pain; it wasn’t sharp and immediate like before, but dull and throbbing, distant. Next there were sounds; he eventually recognized them as voices, Harry and Lori’s. Everyone made it out. How? Where are we? The last was his vision; he had passed out a few more times before he finally came to fully. He recognized the ceiling; the interior of a modular transport ship. Hundreds of thousands of them were mass produced every year, to the same specs by different manufacturers.
His first thought was to panic, since if they were off-planet they had just posted a huge red arrow pointing right at themselves. No way they could have gotten on board a ship without someone IDing them. And every ship leaving this system was being searched, that much he was sure of this late in the game. Anyone who could afford a strike team that could take out a Fang Station could afford damn near anything, up to and including buying off the planetary police. And after all, he was wanted for kidnapping. It would be a small stretch for him to be “killed in the course of resisting arrest,” or some other convenient fiction.
Something was off…the ship didn’t have any power; there was no hum from the atmospherics, no lighting other than a cheap hand torch turned into a lamp; he recognized one of Lori’s scarves draped over the top of it, diffusing the illumination. He looked around, and soon realized they weren’t in space; the large, gaping hole covered with a tarp at the aft of the ship was a pretty big indicator. Harry was close by, sitting on an empty storage crate. “Hey, you’re awake!”
“Where?” Humph tried to speak more, but the single word was the only thing he could croak out; he was dehydrated, at least partially from all the blood loss.
“Lori found it. Old spaceship graveyard. We dragged you here, and she started to patch you up a little.” He pointed down to Humph’s side; there was a crude, but clean, bandage over his wound. “She’ll be back soon; once she is, it’s my turn to try and find some stuff to hold us over here.” Harry shook his head. “You should have seen her, partner. When we were pinned down back in town, she didn’t run out on us. She just slinked up to a couple of the goons—you know how she can strut—and whispered something to them. They put down their guns, just like that! Then she—” He stopped short, shuddering. “Well, she picked up a piece of glass, and just like, opened their throats. Both of them were smiling when she did it, too. Creeped me out a little bit, I’ll tell you.”
Humph coughed. “Kid, she’s a Lorelei. That’s what they do. Lure in men, cut their throats. We’re damn lucky she happens to want our throats intact.” He wasn’t sure if the warning was going to take—the kid was as sharp as a bowling ball sometimes—but he would have felt guilty if he didn’t at least try.
There were footsteps outside. Lori swept the tarp aside, standing in the ragged entrance. “Well, look who lived through the day. Hiya, handsome.” Harry was about to start speaking, thinking she was talking to him, but stopped himself short with a sheepish chuckle when he realized she was addressing the Boggart.
“Hiya yourself. Looks like I owe both of you; I’m not terribly comfortable with that.” He was feeling a little bit better; Lori or Harry must’ve given him pain meds at some point when they were stitching him up.
“Get us out of this mess with our skins intact, and I think we’ll be able to call it even.” She stepped into the shuttle, walking over and handing him a bottle of water. “Got a few things from a guard shack at the entrance of this dump. It’s not much; Harry’s going to need to go out soon to see if there’s something he can pick up. Figured it would be better to rotate who goes out, limit our exposure that way.”
Belatedly, Humph remembered the handful of prepaid credit chips he’d taken from Harry
. Grunting with effort, he reached into his pocket to see if they were still there.
They were. Blood-crusted, but intact. He started to chuckle. Because “blood-crusted” would have raised another enormous red arrow if he’d been human, and his DNA was on file like every other human. The law mandating that DNA be on permanent file went all the way back to the 21st century. But he wasn’t, and given that having a portion of a magic being’s blood meant you could control said being, there were even laws making sure no one ever got the chance to put what passed for their DNA on file. Part of the weekly “housekeeping” chores the Boggart did for himself and the agency was to run a cybermagical routine making certain if anyone had gotten a speck of blood, their data was well and truly scrambled. Harry could pass those cards with impunity, and no DNA-sniffer would get a whiff of the Boggart.
“Here,” he croaked. “Wash ’em off. Lori, rough the kid up a little so he looks like he belongs around here. Harry, think you can act like a drunk? Not a sloppy drunk, just a little happy.”
Harry grinned. “I think I can manage it; I’ve been practicing for most of my adult life.”
He thought for a moment. “Then there’s bound to be liquor stores all over this part of town. Find the ones with food. Buy booze and grab food as if it’s an afterthought, like the wife sent you out for some and you’re taking the chance to get yourself another bottle. Don’t buy too much at any one place. When I say too much, I mean, you buy the cheapest, smallest bottle, and maybe 20 creds worth of sundries over that. Got me?”
“Got it!” Lori broke out a compact of makeup, then proceeded to get Harry in character. Smudges of grease, dirt, and a few applications of her stock of beauty products got him looking the part: disreputable and cheap. Harry finished the disguise with the proper swagger of someone with a decent buzz on. Once he was gone, Lori took up a seat on the makeshift bed.
Reboots: Diabolical Streak Page 8