“You’re not a spy yet, are you, Tycho? We’ll get you clothes in every style and color, but only after you join the club and get the secret decoder ring. Until then, you’ll have to settle for the Tourist Package.”
She ended up dressing me in a black turtleneck with black jeans, black socks, and shiny black shoes. I think if she could have found a black beret, she would have forced me to wear that too.
13
Sif was an ugly town, like most former boomtowns are. Unlike Grise Fiord or Whale Cove, it didn’t have a history. There was no ancient Inuit settlement there or even an old trading post. It was an overgrown mining site, born in a minerals rush less than a hundred years before. What started as a man camp made up of Quonset huts and mess halls was now a grimy and prosaic little city with far too many taverns, brothels, and gambling establishments per capita for its own good. I was reading up on the local culture on my dataspike as we approached, trying to prepare myself for whatever we might run into. It didn’t make for encouraging research.
In Sif, municipal corruption and organized crime are too closely intertwined to be discussed as separate topics. Essentially, local offices of all kinds—from mayor to dog-catcher—are controlled by one of several political clans. Members of these clans own nearly all the city’s semi-legitimate businesses such as bars and gambling establishments, and they are believed to exercise total control over prostitution, drug-dealing, and other forms of vice.
Raven leaned in from the back of the car. “Learning anything interesting?”
“Mostly that Sif is a horrible, horrible little place.”
“Yeah, well…”
She turned on the screen, and the interior of the car suddenly showed a panoramic image of the outside world. The building on our right was like a huge, squat cube, painted in a senseless patchwork of off-white and green. Rust patches stained its surface. To our left, the waves of the Arctic Ocean crashed against the docks, where two cadaverous yellowish-brown polar bears picked through a huge mound of trash. They looked up as we passed but showed little interest. Their eyes gleamed in our headlights, but otherwise the creatures looked half-dead.
Raven gestured at the screen. “I hate this place already.”
“It’s not like we’re on vacation.” Andrea shut the screen off. “Come on, let the car find a parking spot downtown and then we’ll get started. It’s time for your mission briefing.”
“Mission briefing?” I wasn’t one of them, at least not officially. She couldn’t technically brief me.
“That’s right, your mission briefing. Don’t quibble with me, Tycho, just be quiet and listen.”
“You got it, boss.”
She glared at me. “Okay. In my opinion, those Augmen were in town for one of two reasons. Either they needed to meet a contact, or they were tracking down a target.”
“Could be both,” Raven pointed out.
Andrea nodded. “Could be both. If they had a contact here, their contact could have had information about how to find their mark. The reason I’m leaning more toward contact is the StateSec record for the past week.”
“Something unusual?” I asked.
“I guess you could say so, considering that the murder rate here in Sif is about ten times the national average. People get killed here so often they don’t bother to bury them all. If you don’t have family here, your body gets dumped in front of the nearest hungry polar bear.”
I was mildly appalled by this. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“It probably isn’t, but on the other hand it may be the reason Sif has one of the last remaining wild polar bear populations, so there’s that. Anyway, there were no murders on the books last week. Not even one.”
Raven seemed amused by this. “They should hold a parade. Sif is really turning around.”
“I think that might be jumping the gun a little. Either way, it looks like Sif had a good week. Which means no reports of Augmen killers suddenly shooting up half the town, which means no mark. So, I’m guessing that they were here to meet someone with information they needed.”
“It’s a long way to go for a name and address.” Raven drummed her fingers against her legs. “What if they just, you know, fucked it up?”
The car swung into a parking spot and turned the screen back on, so we would know what we were stepping into before we exited. I saw a parking lot and a glowing sign that read The Flying Dutchman. Across the street, there were two other businesses named Terror and Erebus. All bars or similar establishments, from the look of it.
Andrea nodded. “Yeah, that’s possible too. They came here to kill someone but couldn’t find whoever they were looking for. I’ll buy that story, but we still need to get out and have a look around. If they were looking for someone they couldn’t find, then their mark might still be in the area. If they were meeting a local contact, the contact is still probably somewhere nearby. Either way, the person they were looking for knows more than we do.”
“So, our cover is what? Journalists from the big city?”
Andrea laughed. “I wouldn’t try it, Raven. The locals would feed you to the bears before you got the sentence out, and it wouldn’t even have anything to do with our case. A journalist from the big city would not be welcome here.”
“So, what then?” I asked.
“You don’t have any questions and you won’t answer any questions, you’ll kill anyone who looks at you funny. If you act like that, people will just assume you’re up to no good and they’ll take it easy around you. You might overhear something, but more importantly you’ll get to look around. We’re looking for any common factor, anything that stands out about the places these cyborgs visited.”
“Eyes open, mouths shut,” said Raven.
“Exactly.”
The doors popped open, and we stepped out onto the streets of Sif. Inside the Flying Dutchman, someone fired a weapon into the ceiling. We saw the flash through the window and heard the crack. Andrea shook her head. “I’d better clarify. I want you to act like you’ll kill anyone who looks at you funny. I don’t want you to do it. Sif is on a roll; we don’t want to ruin their good thing.”
Raven smiled. “Without my rifle, I’m not a problem for anyone.”
Judging from her smile, Raven in a bar was a problem for everyone. And not just because she still had a sidearm.
Andrea wanted to hear us both say it. “What about you, Tycho? Are you cool?”
“Cool, calm, and collected. But where are you going to be while we’re out there not getting into bar fights?”
“I’ll be nearby. The car picked up some encrypted signals traffic. It’s probably nothing to do with us, but I want to make sure we aren’t being followed.”
She activated her thermoptic camouflage and dropped out of sight. Only a few short days ago, Byron Harewood had criticized me for being too reliant on Arbiter armor and the technological advantages it gave. I had to admit, I wished I had some armor on right then. As it was, all I had was the ridiculous black outfit Andrea dressed me in and a sidearm with plenty of ammo from the Grotto’s armory. It didn’t seem like a lot, not for a place like The Flying Dutchman.
Raven touched my arm. “Come on and buy me a drink. It’s our first date, so don’t get cheap on me.”
With some trepidation, I followed the sniper through the doors of the Flying Dutchman. According to the position data Thomas had given us, this was one of the top three locations where the Augmen had spent time while they were here.
From the look of the place once we got inside, it was certainly plausible that they might have met a contact here. The bar was dimly lit, but even so it was immediately obvious that no one ever came here unarmed or expected anyone else to. Within thirty seconds, I saw a wider variety of firearms, knives, hatchets, and ball-peen hammers than I would have expected to see in your average colonial insurrection. Many of these weapons were clustered down at a long table in the back, under a banner showing a Narwhal, carried by men whose jackets showed the exact same ima
ge. Members of the Narwhal clan.
No one was too obvious about it, but all eyes marked us as we came in. I went up to the bar, ordered two whiskeys, and sat down. Raven somehow managed to smile at everyone, but it was the kind of smile that was more likely to start a fight than to prevent one.
I got her attention and toasted her by raising my glass of clear liquid that in no way resembled or smelled like whiskey.
“If this is our first date, should you really be flirting with everyone in the bar?”
She raised her own glass and knocked it back. “If you can’t keep me, you haven’t earned me.”
The bartender leaned in and spoke under his breath. “You two are welcome, money always is. But mind your manners.”
He looked me in the eyes, and I nodded once. Then he moved away, wiping down the bar with a grayish rag.
Raven looked around. “I don’t see anything that stands out here. It just seems like a normal bar.”
I resisted the urge to ask her how often she hung out at bars controlled by nautical-themed crime clans and concentrated on the mission. “You see that table in the corner? If you were sitting over there, you could keep an eye on whatever street that is without anyone being able to approach you from behind.”
“Let’s go see if there’s anything worth looking at, then.”
We went over to the table, earning a glare from the bartender because we hadn’t ordered any additional drinks. At the Narwhal table, a man with a giant beard was just standing up as his friends laughed at him.
“I don’t know, Tycho.” Raven looked out the window. “There’s really nothing over there but that fish and chips shop, and they don’t even seem to be open.”
“Don’t look now, but I think you have a suitor.”
The bearded man was approaching, egged on by the unhelpful advice of all his clan buddies.
“Go get her, Midge!”
“Tell her all about your horn!”
Raven seemed confused. “Horn? Oh right, that unicorn whale thing.”
When he reached our table, Raven spoke before he had the chance. “They call you Midge?”
“They do.” He grinned, showing a mouth with several chipped and broken teeth. “It’s ‘cause I’m big.”
“You’re not really that big.” She turned to me with an inquisitive look. “I mean, compared to Bray, he’s kind of a little guy, don’t you think?”
Midge’s eyes got an evil gleam in them, and his hand drifted down to the hatchet at his belt as he awaited my response.
“He’s a hell of a lot bigger than I am.”
Midge grinned again. “That’s right, I am. So how about you fuck off and let me talk to the lady here?”
Raven leaned in playfully and whispered something in his ear, and Midge’s jaw dropped. He swallowed nervously and started to back away. “I don’t… no I don’t think I’m into that. Sorry, lady, you’ll have to find yourself another guy.”
He turned around and retreated to an outburst of hilarity from the Narwhal table.
I looked at her suspiciously. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing to do with you.” She smiled sweetly. “Come on, let’s go check out the next spot on our list.”
We left the Flying Dutchman with a lack of bloodshed that seemed almost miraculous. On the street outside, a thin layer of ice crunched beneath my shoes. “The next spot is called the Essex. Says here it’s Snow Wolf territory.”
“I like all the animal names. It’s kind of sweet.”
“Yeah, well… just try not to get us killed in there. Okay?”
“Anything for you, Tycho.”
She put an arm through mine, and we walked the block and a half to the other bar. The Snow Wolves and the Narwhals had a longstanding rivalry for the post of Zoning Officer, so the fact that their clan bars were so close to each other seemed like an oversight on the part of everyone involved. Of course, that was assuming they wanted to avoid random outbreaks of violence, not necessarily a valid assumption.
As we walked down the street, I saw a man walk up rapidly behind another man and push him over, then start kicking him viciously with heavy boots while he curled up on the ground. The one doing the kicking was yelling something about stolen fish.
“Don’t get involved.” Raven’s voice was cold, without a hint of the flirty little games she seemed to enjoy so much. “That has nothing to do with us.”
“Are we just going to let that guy get beaten to death?”
“He probably won’t die, but even if he does, stopping it from happening is not worth our whole mission. You need to focus.”
We reached the Essex, and Raven smiled at the elegant wooden sign out front. “This place is nice.”
She was right, it was nice. A little more elegant than the Flying Dutchman. Not that there was really that much difference between them, but the Essex did have a wooden signboard. We went in through the door and found the interior much the same as the other bar, except that members of the clan that owned the place were less in evidence. There was a banner of a white wolf hanging over the bar, and a man with a gun sitting down at one end. When he saw us come in, he tipped his hat to Raven. I’d like to say it was a mysterious black hat, but it wasn’t. It was a cheap cap with a feed-store logo on it.
She smiled in response then stepped up to the bar to order our drinks. I wandered over to the window to look out on the street, but the view was largely the same as from the other bar—yellow streetlights shining harshly on pavement, and the dark windows of the fish and chips shop.
Raven came up from behind me and handed me the drink. “Just wet your lips. We need to keep our heads straight.”
I took the glass. “But this one is whiskey. Real whiskey, from the look of it.”
“Yeah, the Snow Wolves seem to be a bit higher-end than the Narwhals. I wonder where all their people are though.”
“Probably out plundering a container vessel.”
“That’s not as far-fetched as it you might think. Vessels sometimes get hijacked crossing the Northwest Passage through here. What do you want to bet a lot of that stuff ends up here in Sif?”
She shook her glass and the whiskey sloshed. She had a point. Sif was honestly an awful little city.
“Come on, let’s check out the third spot.” She put her glass down on the windowsill and turned to go. I touched my whiskey to my lips, so I could at least say I had sipped pirated booze, then I did the same.
The third spot was also in the same neighborhood, on the same block as the shuttered restaurant. It was a place called The Mary Rose, and it featured a sign of an alluring woman in red holding a long-stemmed rose. We could hear the music from the street out front. It sounded like a live band, but the style was so out of date as to be slightly embarrassing.
Raven smirked. “You look like you disapprove.”
“Only of the music.”
I followed her inside, a little embarrassed to be entering a brothel. As soon as we walked in, the mystery of the missing Snow Wolves was put to rest. There were at least fifteen of them, milling around and talking with each other quietly or sitting in some corner with one of the girls. They weren’t the only clan present, either. I saw two men with Sea Lions jackets and a woman wearing Caribou colors—the two clans that most often held the office of Mayor. Unlike the Narwhals, most of the clan fighters here carried their guns with some discretion. You could tell they were armed by the way they moved, or the bulge of weapons beneath jackets or shirts, but they didn’t flaunt it.
We had now seen members of four of the five main political clans that controlled Sif, and three of them were hanging out and drinking at the same brothel. I wondered what the regular people of the city did for entertainment, because I wouldn’t feel too comfortable spending an evening downtown if I was one of them.
The stage was in the back, but hardly anyone was paying attention to the band, including the members of the band. Their shambolic performance was off-key, off-rhythm, and under-motivated.
Empty beer cans littered the floor at their feet, although I suspect a number of them might have been thrown there. There were tables in front of the stage, but the only people using one were an amorous couple. I wasn’t sure if their encounter was business or pleasure, but a security guard was leaning over and whispering something fiercely in the man’s ear while reaching discreetly for a stun baton.
Raven leaned in. “Don’t stare at the nice local perverts, Tycho. Come upstairs.”
“Hmm? Come upstairs?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m done playing around for tonight. I want to check something, and I need some backup. If you can get your mind on work, that is.”
I wasn’t technically working, but I followed her up the staircase anyway. As we went up, I heard the sound of a table collapsing, followed by the crackle of the electric baton. The crowd laughed at whatever had happened, and someone shattered a glass on the floor.
When we got upstairs, we found a woman waiting at a little table. She wore thick, dark makeup and had big puffy hair, and she looked at us with jaded eyes. “No outside couples. House girls only. Unless you’re hiring one for both of you.”
Raven put a hand to her mouth. “You read my mind. Can we get a room overlooking the street?”
“No rooms, just booths. But knock yourselves out. Booth 6 on the left.”
Raven reached for her wallet, but the old woman stopped her. “Pay the girl directly. She’ll tell you her price. I can send you a brunette, or… no, just a brunette.”
“A brunette will be fine.” Raven walked toward Booth 6, and I followed behind her with my eyes on my feet.
When we reached the booth, a woman with curly brown hair and a leather skirt came wandering over. “Hey, I’m Chantelle. Should we talk about what you want?”
Raven whispered something to her and Chantelle nodded, then took her payment and went away. I followed my companion into the booth.
“What was it you wanted to check?”
She was leaning across the bed as if setting up a sniper rifle, aiming at a window across the street diagonally. “Do you know what those windows are?”
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 37