Red Noise

by John P. Murphy

  “Then we’ll finally have that fight with Angelica I’ve been wanting.”

  “And if McMasters teams up with her?”

  “You worry too much. Tom’s a wimp. When things get tight, I’ll deal with him. And don’t you worry, I’ll deal with this Jane woman too. I don’t intend to finally knock down Angelica just to replace her with someone twice as dangerous. She’s got a ship I could sell off, make back that ten thousand plus a tidy profit.”

  “You’re treating this like a game, Granddad. This is serious.”

  “Damn right this is serious, child. For months now – months! – I’ve sat here and let Angelica lord it up over there in my casino. Squatting there where I can see her. Every damn day I look out my window and it stabs me in the fecking heart to see it. That’s my property she’s squatting in, and the salvage port I fixed up for Sparks, that greasy ingrate. So I’m paying off that puffed-up hall monitor so he won’t team up with the traitor, and I’m paying an army of incompetent layabouts, and what the devil do I have to show for all that paying, Mary? What do I have to show?”

  Mary made a frustrated noise and sat heavily in the bugged chair. The Miner jumped at the sound.

  “Don’t think I don’t know you wanted to join up with the del Rios, girl.” Feeney said it conversationally, but there was malice in it. “Blood is thicker than water, but that’s not ‘thick’ as in ‘stupid’.”

  “I’ve always been up front with you, Granddad.”

  “Surely, and I appreciate it. You’ve got spirit, and I guess that just cuts both ways, doesn’t it? I built this all up for your father, and when he passed on I kept building it for you and your brother. When I’m gone, you’ll have it and can do what you like with it, but not until then, Goddamn it. And if I haven’t killed that snake Angelica by the time I go, then I hope to God you finish the job. You’ll feel differently about her when you’re in charge, I know you will.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “So I have.” There was another long pause in the audio, and then Feeney said from far away, “How did your talk with Mr Shine go, any…”

  The audio trailed off and went dead again, and stayed dead. The Miner cursed her luck with nano-cap power supplies, then she just stood at the railing. Angelica’s goons had lost interest at some point and slunk away, leaving the casino windows dark. Nobody bothered her. Nobody went out into the galleria at all. The space was designed for night life, she thought. Lots of hidden alcove lights cast dramatic shadows on the trees, the casino and restaurants and bars. It was supposed to be the kind of place she hated, full of laughing, carousing people. Instead it was peaceful, dark, and silent except for someone quietly retching off in a side passage.

  After a while there was movement below, and the Miner stood still. A moment later she watched as the buyer, Gordonson, beaten badly and limping, slunk out of the far shadows. He carried a bag over his back, which made him look more like Santa Claus than before.

  He turned and looked up at the hotel, locked his eyes on her. She looked back impassively. He’d cheated a lot of people, that little snake, and she’d spent three thousand credits buying him passage on the last freighter out of there. It left in half an hour. If he pissed away that chance by joining Angelica, she washed her hands of him.

  He let his bag sink onto his right elbow, then down to the ground with a muffled thump. He dug in one pocket and pulled out a small angular shape that he held out in front of him in both hands, arms outstretched. She sat still as he aimed the pistol up at the hotel, didn’t flinch when he fired.

  The anti-artillery laser clicked and whirred like a disgruntled pigeon. She barely noticed it move in her peripheral vision, only saw the bullet flare phosphorous-white in the air in a bright sharp arc down to the deck.

  The loud retort echoed in the big space and for a while Gordonson stood with the pistol up, panting and staring. She couldn’t tell if he was looking at her, or at Feeney’s window up above, didn’t know where he’d aimed. Who did he hate more, she wondered.

  She waved, and broke the spell. He started like he’d been the one to get shot, then hurriedly stuffed the gun back in his pocket.

  There was a noise from the security station, and muffled voices behind her. Gordonson stooped to snatch his bag, and ran – to the port, not the casino.

  The Miner sighed, and walked back into the hotel through the emerging crowd of gawking misfits and assholes.

  ANGELICA PAYS ATTENTION

  Angelica del Rio paused when she heard the gunshot. She listened a moment, then turned off her book and got up from her desk to go peer at the monitors. The wall showed a dozen angles of the casino, where thugs and morons roused themselves from drunken or stoned reveries in among the slot machines, roulette wheels, card tables, AI fight rings, and all the other flashy garbage Mr Shine had crammed into the place. Her people all looked sluggish and stupid, not alarmed; by the time she’d navigated to the outside cameras, someone in dark clothes was running away with a bag. Older guy, not one of her crew.

  She waved her hands, expanding the view to the full wall, then swimming back in time to watch as he pried a gun from his pocket and held it up at Feeney’s hotel. A burning projectile leapt back into his gun barrel, which he shoved in a bag that crept up his arm back onto his shoulder. Only when he turned back did she get his face, recognizing him a moment after the system painted “Nils Gordonson” above him in friendly green letters.

  “Well, well.” So Feeney had pissed off Anaconda’s buyer. He had that effect on people.

  She returned to her desk, and to the absolutely fascinating transmission her antennas had intercepted. Either the old man had left an unsecured radio active in his office, or – intriguingly – someone had planted a bug in it. She’d seen Tom McMasters go in, and caught the tail end of a conversation between him and Feeney. She’d swept her own operation from top to bottom and found nothing operating on that frequency, so if McMasters was bugging the old man, he was only bugging the old man, and that was interesting.

  The death had been easy enough to follow up: Chuckie hadn’t come back after leaving base, and they’d found him dead not far from Gordonson’s office. The cleaning robots had been at him, and had left a smear of blood down two corridors to where they’d jammed him ineffectually in a too-small trash chute.

  She dug up Chuckie’s video log, which she then locked down. Most of it consisted of his dubious sexual exploits, fistfights with Feeney’s people, and his use of little improvised explosives to blow up trinkets he stole from the locals. In one of them he’d balanced a little cleaning robot on a bucket, and he and his unfilmed buddies had guffawed at its distress beeps before they chortled out a “guilty” verdict for something, and blew it up. Chuckie had been that kind of man, and had been useful to have around. The last video, the reason she’d locked down the log, chilled her.

  Angelica steepled her fingers and watched again. The woman on the video was nothing much to look at: average height, badly-cropped black hair with white streaks, a face that looked like she’d stuck it in a running engine. That sword, though, and the knife strapped to her gray jumpsuited thigh… those were something to look at, something military if she made her guess. Whose military, she couldn’t say, and didn’t really care. Anaconda had hired ex-mil before, the wonderfully, pompously feckless Thomas R. McMasters. But then, who knew what Feeney might be doing with his dwindling pile of credits.

  She ran it through again, watched the woman draw her sword with nearly inhuman speed. Angelica had priced out second-hand combat implants once, and only once. Whoever this woman was, she – or her patrons – had money. The sword whipped toward the camera’s field of view, and disappeared. The view went dark, then light again but with a red film over the picture.

  Angelica pushed her chair back from her desk and exhaled the breath she hadn’t noticed herself holding. She’d seen death, though not very much until the trouble with Wilfred “Nuke” Feeney started. But this felt like a gut-punch in a way that
even the fights she’d been in hadn’t. Those had been adrenaline-fueled, and followed by relieved joking and bragging among the survivors. This was private, almost an execution.

  She saved a selection from it, editing out the woman’s half-hearted attempts to de-escalate. “Back off”? Chuckie? Not likely. That was nothing that McMasters needed to see, if and when Angelica saw fit to share it with him. He was mollified now, fat with Feeney’s cash, but sooner or later the old man would piss him off again, and this would be a useful bit of ammunition.

  The wall still showed the paused views from the galleria. The swordswoman stood frozen on the balcony in front of the old man’s hotel, one hand up in a lazy wave. The system’s green text above her read, “Unknown”.

  A TOUR OF THE FACILITIES

  The Miner didn’t want to go back to her ship, or bring any kind of attention to it at all, so she took Feeney up on the offer of a hotel room. “Finest accommodations in a million kilometers! Clean linens – thread, mind you, not plastics – and the same mattress I sleep on my own self. It’s luxury, I’m telling you.” Luxury wasn’t free, but she’d taken ten thousand off him and twenty off Gordonson, so giving back a hundred a night didn’t sting too bad.

  And as space station hotel rooms went, it was positively swanky: a good quarter meter on all sides of a bed in which she could lay out both arms with only her hands falling over the sides. The ceiling was painted with a video screen, there were VR rig hookups, and the washroom door could be closed so that the head doubled as a gravity shower, which the panel cheerfully informed her could be activated for a mere fifty credits. The commode flushed for free – a good tactical decision, given the number of one-night stays – but the bidet cost three per use. The sink cost the same, though the UV sterilizer was free. The Miner watched the UV flicker and mentally reviewed her day to recall if she’d shaken hands with anyone.

  She sat on the bed a while, staring at the door and deciding how best to handle it. After a while, she went and banged on the wall for a couple minutes until she was reasonably sure there was either nobody next door or they were too polite to complain; either would suit her purpose. She left the room again and with the aid of a few tools, unlocked the door of the neighboring room. Satisfied she could get in and out without trouble, she left a little light sensor in the old room, closed the door, and went to the new room where she could finally relax.

  The hard mattress had lumps like ribs running from head to foot, and whatever thread the sheets were made of was apparently trying very hard to be as plastic-like as possible. Softer than her bunk, but too unfamiliar to be comfortable, and with a faint smell like rubber. She whiled away the time by checking in on her ship. The plants were doing fine; humidity and temperature were in good shape, and the sun lamps had gone off for the night, but the last still picture showed only two fallen leaves from the bonsai and no visible wilting in the orchids. The outside cameras showed two ships leaving: that slick private ship filled with academics, and the freighter that was carrying the provisioner and Gordonson away. That reminded her to check, and she saw that the fuel, air, and water had actually been delivered, and the provisions had been loaded into external hatch B. That had been a good investment, little airlocks with one-time access codes so that she didn’t have to let deliveries come in through the main airlock and get access to the whole ship.

  She tried to call up a book, but without a proper reader she couldn’t concentrate, and anyway she wasn’t in the mood for the mystery novel she’d been working through. Life was complicated enough. After double-checking the sensors and the lock, she turned off the lights and set her communicator to produce background noise, what the ship called “pink noise”.

  That was the beginning of a lengthy staring into darkness, of her active mind reminding her of her problems and anxieties. She’d planned for it, mentally tallying the things she needed to think through in the long hours, and added to that list when she’d felt the uncomfortable mattress. There were always the sleeping pills if necessary.

  She dropped off to sleep at some point, though, and woke to her alarm instead of an hour before it. For a moment she assumed that she’d set it wrong, but it was 0600 station time. More sleep than usual, an unexpected bonus.

  She hadn’t undressed, and only needed time to wash as cheaply as possible before slipping out the door and down the hall. Here and there, people slept on the floors, and she found the bar full of snoring toughs. There was an impressive kitchen behind the bar, though: four prep tables, two big induction grills and two gas stoves, a couple combo ovens, and sinks with faucets that ran freely. The place was a disaster and smelled of mold, but the equipment still functioned. The Miner threw together a scrounged breakfast of some kind of off-brand artificial egg cooked in a pan that might have been clean, then she wandered out into the lobby eating straight from the pan with a fork. The nice thing about living on emergency rations was that pretty much any edible food tasted good.

  She finished half the pan, walking between the sleepers as she ate. The galleria’s day lights were coming up gradually, and she could see the scraggly-looking palm trees through the big windows like great big spidery shadows. A cleaning robot buzzed and bumped merrily among the tables, but otherwise she was the only moving thing around. The place was peaceful, almost pleasant.

  It was while returning to the kitchen to replace the dirty pan that the Miner heard arguing.

  “No way. Just three of us?”

  “It’ll be fine. As soon as Blue gets back from the can we’ll head out.”

  “They’re going around in fours now. I don’t want to be outnumbered, I want to outnumber them.”

  The Miner set the pan gently on the floor and stood with arms folded against the wall next to the door.

  “We don’t have time. Feeney said to relieve the guys watching the cooks, OK? And he said don’t back down from a fight.”

  “Yeah, cool, fine, but I don’t want to get my ass kicked, all right? Let’s wake up a couple more guys, see if they can watch our backs.”

  “Shiiiit. I told you that’ll take forever, and that fucker McMasters said he’d arrest groups that are too big.”

  “So what?”

  “So they have stun batons and they fucking hurt, that’s what.”

  “Getting fucking stabbed fucking hurts too.”

  The Miner waited until she heard a third voice saying, “I’m back, what’s wrong with you assholes?” before she turned the corner and the conversation stopped dead.

  “I heard you looking for a fourth,” she said off-handedly. She rested her hand on the hilt of her sword and yawned. “I could use some exercise.”

  They fell over themselves to invite her along. None of the three of them looked like much of a fighter, the Miner thought. The girl they’d been waiting on, Blue, looked like a nervous scarecrow with fractal-style blue tattoos and gene-modded hair resembling teal-painted aluminum. She had a kind of makeshift cutlass at her hip, and a couple of knives strapped to her jacket and pants in ways that would make them a pain to draw in a fight, probably literally. The big guy, Khan, saw the Miner looking, made a wrong guess, and confided with a waggle of his thick unibrow, “Rumor is if you get her clothes off she’s got bits that glow. Guess what color.” Khan was tall and wide but really just big, not muscular. He wore black from head to toe, and fingered a structural spar that had been sharpened down like a heavy machete. A little cartoon cat head on a chain grinned up at her in its pendulum swing. They hurried to explain that Feeney wanted someone to check in on the “cooks”, who the Miner took to be making drugs down below on deck six, away from where people lived.

  “They don’t exactly work for the old man,” the heavy-set guy with all the bright red-dyed scars, Scratch, explained as they made for the door. He had some kind of cudgel with faint ridges like they might have come out of a printer, and it only took a few minutes of watching him apparently search for fleas to understand his nickname. “But they agreed to only sell through him.”
>
  The Miner nodded thoughtfully. “So the four of us go check on them and make sure Angelica’s not horning in. Maybe have some fun if they are.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Make that five,” came a voice behind the Miner. Mary Feeney crossed her arms and made clear that five was the right number for that bit of fun. “I want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth.”

  “More the merrier,” the Miner said, and wondered whether Mary was keeping tabs on her for her grandfather, or out of her own suspicions.

  They set off through the hotel back passages, downstairs and to the door for laundry and deliveries. The Miner let the original three, now comforted and psyched by their honor guard, prattle on about how much ass they were going to kick and how sweet this was all going to be.

  “What kind of fighters does Angelica have?” the Miner wondered aloud.

  The chorus of response indicated that the other side was so feeble it was amazing they hadn’t all blown away with the first really bad fake egg fart. The Miner bit back the question about why old man Feeney was having such a hard time beating them. Instead she thought about some of the rumors. “I heard del Rio’s brother’s something.”

  “Raj?” Scratch looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, he’s pretty tough, I guess. Not as tough as you, lady. Or you, Mary!”

  Mary looked troubled, and stared at the deck as they walked. “Don’t go gunning for the brass,” she muttered. “Assassination’s off-limits. That’s from the old man himself.”

  “All right,” the Miner said. “I’ll steer clear. Where should I steer clear of, just to be sure?”

  She snorted. “Transparent. Just don’t fight him if you see him. Him or Angelica.”

  “You’ll have to kill Angelica eventually, you know. This two-party thing isn’t stable.”

  “I’m sure you’re so sad about that.”

  The Miner shrugged. “I got paid in advance,” she said. “I want you to win so I look good, but I don’t actually care.”