“I always assumed you were so fast because the Doc just made really good gear. But that ain’t it, huh?”
“Nope,” Lucia said with a wry grin, “I’m not augmented to be fast at all, I was born fast. But the mutation was killing me. I’m augmented to survive how fast I am all on my own.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Boss, but that’s creepy as hell.”
“I’m over it. I’m unique, though. Dad’s never tried my machines on a normal brain, because he’s pretty sure it would kill the host.” Her gaze shifted over to the big cyborg. “Mindy’s video clearly showed Chico’s reflexes acting above the industry’s accepted hard limit. Somehow his frontal cortex is processing information faster than five times the normal rate without frying itself.”
“I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody figured out how do to it,” Roland grumbled.
“That’s exactly what Dad said.”
“Do we have a countermeasure?”
“Not yet. Not unless you consider me to be one.”
Roland scowled. “What?”
“I can go that fast, Roland. One firmware update and I’ll be able to outrun him. His body appears unarmored, so as long as I can hit him, I can kill him.”
The big bald head shook emphatically. “Hell no. You’ll rip your own joints apart. Worse, you won’t care because your risk-aversion and empathy will be gone, too. This is not a video game. We can’t just treat you like a piece of hardware to be turned up and down as we see fit, Lucia. This is your mental and physical health you want to fuck around with. We’ll find another way.”
“It doesn’t thrill me either, big guy. But it’s an option we have if we find ourselves against the wall.”
Roland turned from her and stalked off to his bedroom to find some clothes. Over his shoulder he growled, “Let’s stay the hell away from the wall, then.”
Lucia heaved a heavy sigh as he disappeared through the door. Mindy threw an arm over her shoulder and whispered, “It’s so cute when men act all protective and authoritative like that.”
“Oh yeah. He’s all kinds of adorable,” Lucia replied.
“I assume you will do whatever the hell you think you need to do anyway, right?”
“Obviously,” Lucia confirmed. “He knows it, too.”
“He’s a nice boy, Boss. I say you keep him.”
“I must admit, he does open the hell out of a pickle jar.”
“A fine quality in any man,” Mindy agreed with solemn conviction.
“Oh for fuck’s sake you two!” A voice like gravel being crushed under tank treads rumbled from the other room. “I can hear you, you know.”
“Good,” said both women in unison.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Chico Garibaldi? Really?” Sam Parker was not sure he believed what he was hearing. “Chico Garibaldi just stomped a mudhole in you guys because he is obsessed with The Dwarf’s bartender?”
Roland, now dressed and looking far more presentable, sat in his kitchen sipping on an enormous cafe mocha. Lucia sat beside him guzzling her equally voluminous coffee. Mindy had left with Kitty to secure some more clothes and necessities for her stay.
Lucia shook her head in response to the detective’s incredulous tone. “Well, yeah it sounds stupid when you come right out and say it like that. But Chico is not the main event here. He’s a pawn. This whole thing has ‘Brokerage’ written all over it.”
She gave a quick briefing to the young detective, outlining what they knew and their suspicions while showing him the captured hand and Chico’s mutilated pistol.
“That explains the new pressure from my department, too,” Parker said when she had finished. “A police force that actually works is about the last thing The Brokerage wants right now.” The young detective pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger and winced as if in deep existential pain. “And that leads to my next item. Guess who paid off his entire debt to The Dwarf last night?” A wry shake of the head signaled both disbelief and disgust.
“Ha!” Roland barked. “I think we can all guess how your LT got a hundred grand so damn fast.”
“Hey, I’m the detective here, Tank. I’ll do the deducing.” The joke fell flat, Sam sounded too tired to sell it. “It sure as hell tracks all right. Good for us for being so damn clever.”
Lucia’s exasperation was plain to hear. “The Brokerage wants the pressure back on, so now they own your department. Great.”
Parker nodded. “Looks that way.”
“With our leverage on your LT gone, where does that leave you, Sam?”
“Let’s be real clear, I am not going to get anywhere if a heavy load like The Brokerage is leaning on my department.” He leveled an even gaze at the pair of fixers. “I will need leverage of my own.”
“Maybe a good project for Mindy?” Lucia posed it as a question. “She is very good at ensuring compliance in ways money cannot compete with.”
“I can’t hear that,” Parker warned.
“Just thinking out loud, detective.”
“Then let’s make it a point to think about having her visit Pritchard, too.” The detective mumbled this part just loud enough to be heard. “He’s on me like a barnacle these days.” His face wore a convincing expression of bland innocence as he spoke.
Roland’s lips curled into a mean smile. “Table that for now Lucy, but I gotta say I don’t hate the idea.” Then he switched to a less controversial topic. “I have a lead on the gun and we know the hand is a Corpus Mundi product. I think you should look into that, Sam. Gun-runners won’t talk to you, and Corpus Mundi is not going to be real helpful to me. We have a history. Big corp like that will have to play nice with the cops though. Obstruction charges are real bad for the stock price.”
“You have a history with everybody,” Sam sighed. “I recognize your handiwork with that secret CM facility mess a few years back. It’s no wonder they hate you."
“No idea what you are talking about,” Roland deadpanned.
“Your methods are pretty easy to spot, Tank. When a whole Uptown building gets overrun and destroyed by a bunch of trigger-happy mercenaries, it’s not hard to guess who they were really shooting at. You cost them a lot of money and political capital that night.”
Roland refused to budge. “You must have me confused with somebody else.”
“Right. I must.”
Lucia put them back on track. “I suggest you pull some scary-sounding warrants for any suspicious CM facilities in the area. You won’t get the right one, but you’ll be shaking the tree. Perhaps something helpful will fall out.”
Parker nodded. “It shouldn’t be too hard. Their facilities are all in Uptown and The Sprawl, and those police departments are way less corrupt than my coworkers here in Dockside. All that legwork will keep me in areas Pritchard can’t fuck up.”
The big bald head ducked in agreement. “We have Mindy watching Kitty, but Chico is way off the rails. Lucia doesn’t think this mysterious ‘Bob’ guy is going to rein him in, either. Is Elena safe?”
The sides of Parker’s neck took a slight flush at her name, and his voice jumped up half an octave. “Uhm. Yeah, yes. She’s, ah, under police protection for now.”
“I don’t think Dockside PD is truly the best group of people to be...”
Lucia shut Roland up with a slap to the back of his head. “No one should be this dense, Roland. Sam is the police protection.”
Sam’s neck turned an even brighter and more obvious shade of fuchsia. “She’s in a secure location, and I am managing her security personally.”
Roland still looked as if he thought this was a bad idea. Lucia walked him to a realization he had no chance of getting to on his own. “They’re shacked up, Roland.”
“Oh.” Beady black eyes widened. “That took longer than I expected.”
Parker had the appearance of a man who would prefer a grisly death over continuing this line of discussion. “The important thing is that she’s s
afe for now. What makes me nervous is a squad of armed goons landing on The Drag after you tore the street up fighting Chico. Our friend ‘Bob’ has all my ‘what-the-hell’ alarms ringing at the moment. Who the fuck is he? Who is he working for?”
Lucia spread her hands to the side, palms up. “If we are right about this being a Brokerage thing? Then the smart money says he’s one of theirs. They want the Docks very badly.”
Roland growled. “There are too many dogs in our yard these days. It’s just a few murders and a single rogue psycho for the moment, but that fight on The Drag is going to raise a lot of the wrong eyebrows. If Gateways gets it in their heads to jump in, the whole damn thing is going to go straight to hell.”
“We really don’t need another squad of armed goons stomping around,” Lucia concurred. “I’ll call Tom at their office and inform them that we are aware of the situation and handling it.”
“We need to push these Brokerage guys back, and hard.”
“So we hit them where we always do. Where it hurts the most,” Lucia said.
Parker looked confused. “Where’s that?”
The fixers spoke in unison. “The wallet.”
Lucia fleshed it out. “Sam, go pull those warrants and start making life hell for Corpus Mundi. Roland will find out who made that pistol and who bought it. I’ll take Manny and go hunt down our new friend, Bob.”
“You got a lead?” Parker asked.
“The transport they used. Spoofing registrations for military hardware can’t be easy. Manny will find it. The Brokerage has probably buried who owns it, but someone does own it and it definitely needs a garage.”
Roland had to agree it was a good angle. “Nice. Manny might not find our bad guys, but he sure as hell can find that troop transport. Let’s get cracking. I think we have a couple of days at least before Chico pops up.”
Sam raised an eyebrow at this statement, and Roland explained. “It’s obvious something is wrong with whatever they did to him and they won’t risk letting him out again until they find it. Let’s use this break as well as we can.”
With that, the group split up, each to the task that best suited them. Parker left to pull a few dozen warrants, and Roland clomped out to intimidate a few dozen criminals.
Lucia called Manuel and fifteen minutes later the young Venusian infiltrator rang the door chime. As was his way, the bright-eyed and eager scout pursued his tasks with an irrepressible energy only the young and foolish could muster.
“What’s the plan, Boss?”
“I need you to find an unregistered military-style troop carrier.”
A broad smile split his deep tan features. “I thought you had something difficult for me.”
“I think it’s owned by The Brokerage.”
“That’s more like it.” The smile drooped, but only by a small degree.
He sat down at the kitchen table and opened his DataPad. In short order the youth had access to the city traffic grid, and he pulled the records from their fight with Chico. Lucia hated how easily he broke into municipal systems. It made her anxious and paranoid.
Manny did not notice her discomfort. He was a man in his element and enjoying himself. “Okay, Boss. The transponder was spoofed, no surprise there. It’s pinging as a produce hauler to match the weight and other dimensions. The hauler registration goes to a distribution company from The Sprawl, and ownership of that company spins off into the mists of Brokerage witchcraft.” Though an excellent scout and infiltrator, deciphering corporate entanglements fell well outside his skill set.
Abandoning that thread, he switched to a more promising one. “That’s vapor. Forget about it. The transport matches the specs for a Warthog. Good solid tech. Still a bunch of those in use by the UEDF, but a lot available as military surplus, too. Clever.”
Lucia frowned. “Lots of military surplus gets sold at auction, right? Crap.”
“Yeah, makes it real hard to figure out who bought what. A couple of hard cred deposits, one silent bidder, and poof!” He pantomimed a puff of smoke. “Another troop ship disappears into obscurity.”
“Where did it go after leaving The Drag?”
Manny swiped through some screens and pursed his lips. “It’s scrambled once they leave the area. They started going due south, but that doesn’t really mean anything.”
“Goddammit!” Lucia almost shouted it. “Is there anything we can get from it?”
“Think like a scout, boss,” Manny replied with a smirk. “I can’t really tell where they flew off to, but I sure as hell can figure out quite a few places they didn’t or couldn’t go.” He pointed to his screen where a map of New Boston lit up the display. “They did not go to Uptown. I dare you to fly a troop transport through there with a spoofed ID and a scrambled transponder. You’d be shot down in minutes. So that’s out.” He jabbed a finger to the areas south of Uptown and east of Dockside. “Quinzy? With all the shipyards? Great place to hide a troop ship, but just like Uptown you are not going to go far without your telemetry in order. Too many military contractors with stuff there.” He waggled a finger to the west. “Big Woo? Totally safe to fly over. They couldn’t scan you if they wanted to. And let’s be honest, they don’t want to. You could fly a burning fleet carrier over those poor bastards and they wouldn’t even look up.” He waved a finger at the screen for a second. “But it isn’t Big Woo, either. Big Woo is Billy’s turf, no way to hide once you land there. Billy knows everything that goes on in The Woo.”
Lucia’s brain was beginning to churn. Every piece of information Manny gave her fleshed out the possibilities. A landscape of disparate theories condensed into discrete strings of causality. It was like a field of grass where each blade represented one potential answer. Still, there were too many gaps in her understanding. The millions of potential scenarios stretched before her with no way to separate the likely from the implausible.
Now Manny smiled. He understood how her mind worked and he knew how to help it. “They arrived quickly, right? Just a few minutes after the fight started?”
Lucia was catching on. “And with a name like ‘Warthog’ I’m betting it’s not fast.”
“Exactly. Therefore, we can assume they are not based too far away from Dockside.”
Now, with more information to work with, her brain started organizing dozens of permutations to match the data. She mumbled as she thought. “Somewhere close by, not well scanned or patrolled, that could also hide a big transport. Can’t be too heavily populated, but with available tech and resources for a small fighting force and possibly a research facility.”
There were still too many possible answers. The field of grass morphed into a forest of wide branching trees. Each built upon a central trunk of plausibility but devolving into a weave of interlocking fractals. She was missing something. Manny nudged her train of thought. “Produce hauler, Boss.”
The forest of possibilities collapsed into a single tree. It had many branches, but it was alone.
“The Ag zones!” she cried.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” he agreed. “Wide open areas with no people. Big hangars full of large transports. Very little in the way of law enforcement. A bunch of huge automated factory farms protected by private security forces in the middle of nowhere.”
Her mumbling continued. “They can’t fly north or east without getting nailed, but south and west are safe enough. Who owns the zones south and west of here?”
“Give me a second.” Tan fingers flew across the DataPad. “Got it. There are four leased zones to the south and west of Dockside that are within the range of what a Warthog can manage in fifteen minutes or less.”
Lucia squinted at the list. Each name was a branch on her tree, and each branch had branches of its own. A thousand parameters were evaluated in a dizzying string of holistic interactions. Connections were made, and the most probable traits coalesced in her thoughts. She dismissed the unlikely candidates one by one, and he tree lost limbs with each rejected possibility.
She settled a thin finger on the last name on the list. The finger tapped, and the woman considered. Then she grinned.
Timber!
“Here we go, Manny. This one is juuuuuust right.”
The tree fell.
Manny did not follow her reasoning. “OmniCorp? You sure, Boss? That’s one high-profile accusation. How do you figure?”
“OmniCorp spreads its holdings across multiple vertical markets, all in supply chain management. They have large mining operations, plenty of agriculture, hydrocarbon assets, and a huge portfolio of retail suppliers and wholesalers. It’s why they are called ‘OmniCorp.’”
“They are the company that sells everything,” Manny agreed.
“Exactly. If our bad guy is The Brokerage, it’s safe to say they need lots of different things. They need military hardware, a large security force, R&D supplies and personnel, vehicles. Plus the infrastructure to take over a huge smuggling operation if they win.”
“OmniCorp.” Manny sounded surer of it now.
“Best guess, anyway,” she said with a shrug. “But I like it.”
“That Ag zone is four hundred square miles, Boss. What are we looking for?”
“A hangar, obviously. But they’ll all have one. We need a big facility to hide the R&D and security forces.”
“Lots of those, too,” Manny sighed.
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