They went back to staring at the gentle fall of snow and passed the evening in silence.
MATTHEW HATED THE JOB almost before it really got started. “This contract was for everyone else,” he said, mostly as a reminder to himself. “Not for me.”
“What’s that?” Abigail whispered, turning to face him from her poker game.
He shook his head and she went back to her cards, pretending to study them intently. Casino operators were feeding her information through an earpiece. This was one of the games that she was scheduled to win big on. It was a bizarre night. Matthew had stoically escorted her around the Casino to the various games and machines. Most of the time she played fairly, which predictably led to big losses. The house always wins, after all. But on occasion, at pre-planned moments, she won big enough to obliterate her shortfalls. She’d stop Matthew and point at a slot machine. “This one,” she’d say, and he knew that her earpiece had informed her that particular machine was rigged in her favor. Or a blackjack dealer would count cards to give her easy wins.
He tried to shrug it all off. It was all a farce. They weren’t keeping the winnings, and they weren’t eating the losses. But it did start to bother him when they reached the poker tables. They were supposed to draw attention, which would require them hitting more social games. Unfortunately that meant there’d be losers. Sarandib Grand Resort had promised him that anyone Abigail personally took money from would be reimbursed after the job was complete, he just hoped they were keeping a close eye on the numbers and not going to cheat anyone.
It was a world of vice, and the ex-priest in him was getting twitchy.
At least Abigail was having fun. Once she’d warmed up to the role of rich heiress, she had decided to ham it up.
“Hey,” she called out to the barrel-chested man across from her with the giant white cowboy hat. “I could have run a marathon by now.” Everyone at the table stared at her wheelchair, but the big man was intimidated into making his play. He pushed in his handful of chips. Matthew tried not to wince. He wasn’t well versed in poker, but he was fairly confident Abigail was breaking a lot of casino etiquette with her banter. She was drawing attention, which was the whole goal of this operation, but it still made him feel like he was on the wrong side.
And he was pretty sure he wasn’t the only bad character. Besides the mostly harmless man that Abigail had just bullied, there was a man from Europa covered in tattoos identifying the slave cartel of which he was a member, and another in a white suit that Matthew was certain was White Void. If you knew anything about the solar system, and those wealthy enough to come to Enceladus most certainly did, you knew that white suits meant only one thing. Either it was worn by a wealthy idiot or a high-level syndicate enforcer.
He won that particular hand. Abigail leaned over and patted his arm. “You seem to know what you’re doing.”
He jerked away. “Do not lay another hand on me, ma’am.”
She recoiled as if burned. “I would have thought you would be the type to appreciate the attention of a lady, but perhaps that’s so uncommon an experience for you that you don’t know how to behave when it happens.”
He sneered. “The attentions of half a woman are hardly worth noticing.”
Abigail’s mouth turned up in a smile, one that Matthew had seen a thousand times. “If you think I’m wounded by the scorn of a tenth of a man, you’re flattering yourself.”
The cartel man laughed and nearly spat out his drink. “Leave her be, Scissors. She’s just trying to get into your head. How do you think she’s been cleaning us out?” Abigail blinked at them innocently.
The man with the white hat motioned to the dealer, clearly irritated with the unnecessary drama. “Let’s get on with this.”
Abigail won, of course, with the coaching in her ear. How could she lose when they were cheating? But Matthew felt a little less guilty knowing that two of the people losing were criminals. The fellow Martian was short about fifty thousand because of the casino’s own meddling. He would get it back, or Matthew would lodge a complaint against the Casino and go public on this one.
Shortly after midnight, Abigail called it quits, and Matthew wordlessly pushed her out of the gaming halls to the tram-station. The attendant made sure they were safely loaded into the hanging car and sent them on their way to the heiress’ suite.
“I can’t wait to get out of this dress,” she moaned. “I haven’t worn one of these things since I was a teenager.” She gripped the wheels of her chair and moved closer to the window. He stepped up beside her. The tram took them out over the snowy fields to one of the other crossing arches. The resort’s rooms hung independent and free beneath the graceful steel curves to give them each a spectacular view of the surrounding landscape. Matthew would have rather gone back to the Sparrow, but that wasn’t part of the gig.
Someone was preying on women who were winning big at the casino. There had been three incidents. One blackmail, one kidnapping, and one outright robbery. Each had happened after several days of success on the floor, and all of the events started when their supposedly secure rooms were invaded.
“I don’t really like using you as bait,” Matthew said.
“Hold up. You were the one telling me it would be okay earlier, and now you’ve got complaints?”
Matthew grunted and closed his mouth. Okay, maybe that was a little bit of a flip.
She poked him in the side, and he turned on her with a frown. “You okay?” she asked.
Their tram pulled up to the suite and the door opened into an antechamber that would make the palace on Venus blush in shame. Seeing the opulence just soured his mood further. He tore off his face mask and started to take off the armor, dropping them in a corner by the door to his room.
Abigail wheeled forward and stopped in front of him, arms crossed. “You ignored my question. Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, and he was pretty sure he was telling the truth. He knew he couldn’t put the strange disquiet he felt into words. Not yet, anyway. He gestured to her room. “Go get suited. We’ve got a long night of sitting up waiting for you to get attacked.”
GRACE AND DAVEY SPENT the first full afternoon on Enceladus out in the snow, learning to ski. Davey tried to convince her it was a worthless endeavor, because when would they ever get the chance to use that skill again?
She just stared at him and wondered where her brother had gone. “You’re starting to sound like Matthew,” she told him. “All work, no play. Except for your boring books. I’ll probably be better at it than you anyway.”
She was wrong. Maybe it was because he was short and had a low center of gravity, but he was a natural, zipping across the snowfields like he’d been born here. She hated having to eat her words, and every time he helped her dig herself out of the snow after a fall, he gave the grandest, most insufferable smirk he had in his arsenal. It bothered her until she found the courage to admit defeat.
The craziest part of the snowfields was the way gravity changed. You’d pull up to the beginning of a perfectly flat slope and approach a console and select a difficulty. And then gravity would change directions in a gut-wrenching fashion. Davey wasn’t as phased by the way the world suddenly changed from flat to mountain slope.
“You should have seen what I was up against on Ceres,” he said. “Driving across the roof of a city is way worse.”
By the end of the day, they were both tired, and Grace was already talking about how late she was planning on sleeping in. Once they had cleaned up, Davey had to drag her out of the Sparrow and back to the tram that led to the main resort. She was silent on the trip over the fields, face pressed to the window. A hundred meters below them, she could make out some of the slopes they’d hit earlier. In some places, large treaded vehicles scoured the powdered surfaces flat again, erasing the marks of the day’s skiers.
They grazed the buffet for the second night in a row. The food was great, if not quite amazing. Grace was pretty confident that Eliza
beth’s cooking was better, but she did appreciate the bounty of choices available. Tonight she stacked her plate high with Mexican food, including a pair of enchiladas drizzled in a green sauce, in honor of Enceladus. Unfortunately, the green sauce had cilantro. She ate it anyway, never willing to waste a morsel of food. But the real glory of a buffet was seconds and thirds if you wanted. She was going to pack on a few kilos before this was over at the rate things were going, but at the moment she didn’t care.
They spent the rest of the evening exploring the nooks and crannies of the resort. It was habit. Instinct. Whenever they had moved to a new neighborhood in Blight, they would scour every street, looking for possible sources of food, bolt holes, shortcuts. If you didn’t know the lay of the land like you’d been there your entire life, you didn’t stand a chance.
Which was how they found an out of the way bank of slot-machines in an abandoned lounge. For such a big and supposedly popular resort, there sure were a lot of empty venues. Grace walked over to the closest machine and jabbed a thumb at it. “Hey, do you think Matthew would get on to me if he knew I was this close to a machine of destruction and sin?”
“Probably,” Davey said, joining her. She saw the spinning lights reflect off his eyes.
“Give it your best shot,” she said.
He eyed her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Do your best Matthew impression. Full priest mode. He’s been training you to be a shorter version of himself for two years now. You know you have it in you.”
He stared at her, mouth agape. He tried to start talking twice, and each time shut his mouth before he got out a single word. Finally, he frowned. “I think I’m offended.”
“Nah. The solar system could use a second Matthew. Go on. Try.”
He looked back at the machine and sighed. “Look, I don’t have the speech thing down. But Matthew sometimes likes to demonstrate with object lessons so...” He dug out his wallet and found a five-dollar coin. “You owe me for this, by the way.”
“Sure,” she said, gesturing for him to continue.
“Umm. Matthew would talk a lot about honest work and how valuable it is, and then he’d also explain about how casinos aren’t here to give you money and maybe something about stacked odds. And to prove it...” He put the coin into the machine and pulled the lever. The lights changed, and some wheels began to spin.
“I think you have to hit that flashing button,” Grace suggested.
“Right.” He hit the button, and the wheels slowly turned to a stop. A bunch more lights flashed, and an annoying chime rang out. The machine printed out a ticket.
“Umm, is it supposed to do that?” Grace asked.
Davey tore off the ticket to look at it, and she saw the color drain from his face. “I think I just won two-hundred dollars.”
Grace snorted once. And then she bent double from laughter. “Worst demonstration. Ever!”
“Crap, crap, crap,” he muttered. “Matthew is going to kill me.”
“So just throw the ticket away,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“He’ll know. He always knows!”
Grace patted him on the back. “Oh, man. This is your problem. I haven’t laughed this hard in months. Good lecture.”
He still looked stricken. “Maybe if I buy groceries with it, he won’t be mad.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Grace said, patting him on the arm. “Come on. Let’s go get your payout.”
He groaned as they left the abandoned lounge. The lights automatically dimmed behind them. “How is it that every time I get in trouble, you’re involved?” he said through gritted teeth.
“Hey,” she said, giving him an elbow. “Even if I’m a bad influence, you’re still the common factor in all your screw-ups.”
He let out a long, despondent sigh. “And you just made a better Matthew speech than I did.”
MILENA DRUGOVA TOOK a sip of her black coffee. The diner she sat in was nearly deserted at this time of the afternoon, but that was for the best. She wasn’t here to be social. Idly she turned to look out the window. Beyond the busy sidewalk and traffic was the largest park in Flagstaff. Between the rolling grass-carpeted hills sat a lake that sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. It would have been a lovely place for a walk had she not been here for business.
She’d barely gotten word of the meeting in time to set up a camera in a nearby tree last night. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to wire it, meaning she’d have to stay within its transmitter range. If the coffee hadn’t been so good, that would have been a more annoying proposition. On her tablet, a man walked into the camera’s field of view where a bench overlooked the lake. It wasn’t Stein, nor was it any of the contacts she’d previously seen. He wore a satin vest under a long duster and a cowboy hat. Nothing out of the ordinary for Arizona, but the tailoring looked on the expensive side of trendy. He turned away from the camera, so she couldn’t get a good look at this face. With luck, she’d get a view on his way out.
Milena double-checked the audio feed to her earpiece. There wasn’t anything to hear at the moment other than the gentle lap of water and the distant sounds of a playground full of children, but the feed was loud and clear. She took another swig of her coffee and settled in to wait as the man did the same.
Ten minutes later, he was joined by Stein himself. She pushed her coffee away and upped the volume. To her relief, the microphone was able to pick up the voices well enough to hear them over the ambient noise. Still, she adjusted the EQs to make their voices stand out from the background.
“What’s so important that it can’t wait,” Stein asked in his deep baritone.
“I’ll be off Mars for a few days,” the stranger said in a clipped British accent. Churchill wasn’t a HiTO colony. Stein’s connections were continuing to get more complex. “I have an appointment to keep that can’t wait.”
“You still owe me for Gilgamesh.”
Milena frowned at her table. Gilgamesh was the location of the Ganymede grav plate factory. Either this was a coincidence, or she had just stumbled onto something crucial.
“And you’ll be paid for the work you did. Soon. The loss of the grav plate shipment was an unfortunate set back to my finances. But your payment is still a priority.”
Stein only shook his head. “That’s not how I operate. This is your fault for playing games with Cole. There was no reason he had to be present for that operation, I’m not paying the cost.”
“On the contrary,” the stranger said. “His presence was required and will soon pay dividends. You nearly ruined everything with your ill-fated attempt to kill him. Thankfully, he survived and the Sparrow is far from your reach.”
Milena pursed her lips. Thompson had been right about Stein being the assassin.
“You’re not my only client. I can’t help that there are conflicts if you aren’t specific enough in your contracts. I’ve held to my terms. You’re the one who has failed to execute.”
“That will be rectified soon enough. Once I have what I want, I’ll have more than enough leverage to settle our accounts.”
“You’d better,” Stein said. “One last chance, or I’ll collect my own way.” He cracked his knuckles in an overly dramatic fashion that had Milena rolling her eyes. “Now,” he said, “Why the meeting? It wasn’t just to make excuses.”
“No,” the stranger said. “It was to give you a warning.”
Stein scoffed. “You’re threatening me now?”
“As if I could harm you. Others can, though, and that’s what concerns me. If anyone were to learn of our business relationship, I suspect your career would suffer considerable harm. And you still have yet to deliver certain codes you’ve promised.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve done business with worse than you.”
“I doubt the Arizonan government would agree with that assessment,” the stranger said, an amused lilt to his voice. “Very well. I’ll keep my warning to myself.” He passed a
data chip to Stein. “You’ll have the codes by the time the operation commences?”
“I’ll play my part. And then you’ll have my payment, or I’ll cancel our arrangement.”
He didn’t make subtle threats, Milena thought.
“Of course. You won’t hear from me before then.”
Stein stood and left without another word, leaving the stranger alone on the bench. Milena reached for her now cold cup of coffee. This was going to be quite a report to send back to Mr. Kagurazaka. And Thompson. He’d promised payment for further information, and this was about as good as he was going to get. Confirmation that Stein was behind the attempted assassination and that he was working with what appeared to be an Abrogationist, if the Gilgamesh comment was to be believed.
After about a ten-minute wait, the stranger stood to leave. “Turn your head,” she muttered. “Just a fraction to the right and—” As if he heard her, he turned and walked up to the tree that concealed her camera. Then he looked right at the lens and tipped his hat to her. There was no mistaking that face. After the Ceres Incident, it had been broadcast all over the colonies. Alexander Logan.
She tucked her tablet into her coat, and jumped back from her booth, springing out the diner’s door. This was way outside the purview of the job, but if she could somehow apprehend him... Her camera was only a couple hundred meters away. Maybe she could reach it in time. She dodged through traffic, ignoring the blaring horns and hurled obscenities. When she hit the grass, she briefly stumbled, as her shoes weren’t meant for running cross country, but she kept going, heart hammering in her ears.
After Moses: Wormwood Page 30