“Well I care. I fucking live here.”
“So do they. Someone’s gonna be unhappy.”
The three stooges had long since gone quiet, realizing too late that this wasn’t going to be as fun an outing with their side’s two toughest fighters as they thought.
“Well, Granddad’s paying you, so it better not be us.”
The Miner yawned. They’d descended a staircase, having independently decided that being stuck in an elevator was a bad idea, and came to a T intersection. They stopped when they heard the hallmark of bad ambushes everywhere: the excited whisper “Here they come!” followed by multiple voices going “shhhhh!” They exchanged looks: the three stooges nervous, Mary cautious, and the Miner exasperated.
“Ours?” Khan murmured. Mary shook her head, no.
“I expected a better class of idiot,” the Miner said, not whispering. She popped her sword’s magnetic clasps with her thumb, and the click echoed down the empty passage.
There was another long silence. A head poked out around the corner and ducked back. Hurried whispering drifted down the hallway, too confused to be made out over the low drone of the ventilation fans, but the syllable “shit!” figured prominently. Then the five of them heard running.
“That was fun,” said Mary.
“Ish,” said the Miner.
The stooges came down from their adrenaline highs with whoops and laughs, jeering down the passageway at their fleeing foes and slapping each other on the back.
Their party continued on toward hydroponics, or so the Miner assumed as they followed a series of turns that left her disoriented, but which the other four seemed to know well enough to not even pause at the splits. The old military layout was designed to be hard to navigate for anyone not wearing a keyed-in personal nav. She wondered if the others had one, but there were no signs of them listening to sub-audible instructions. They passed old blood stains a couple times, and then a relatively fresh pool, stinking badly. Two trails led from it up the passageway for a long way before fading. The Miner wondered if their janitorial staff had any humans left, and if so how long it would take before they snapped and killed everybody just to have time to catch up. Small bits of trash and other clutter collected in corners and along the walls.
“We’re keeping the bots busy,” said Blue, probably thinking along the same lines as they passed the clotted dark puddle. “You guess that was one of theirs or ours?”
“Can’t tell you apart by the smell of your blood yet,” the Miner said.
Ten more steps down the hall, Mary said, “She’s joking.” The stooges dutifully laughed.
The second ambush was much better. The Miner heard a faint buzzing noise as they entered an intersection with a cross-hallway, and two groups descended on them from both sides.
She’d been walking with her hand resting on her sword; she had it out of her sheath the moment a buzzer sounded, and up in time to deflect a blow from a sledgehammer by way of its bearer’s exposed wrist, then to step into the person swinging it down over his head and slice up the length of his torso. One step to the right away from the gout of blood put her in view of three other attackers arrayed behind him. There was a brief moment where they stared each other down. A crackling and buzzing stun baton and two knives waved uncertainly in the air as their hammer-wielding comrade gurgled and whined in pain as he fell to one knee against the wall. The baton-holder immediately behind him made a move, just a twitch, and the Miner lashed out with the tip of her sword, a single stroke up the forearm to tear it open and send the buzzing weapon flying and its wielder stumbling away.
Her combat augments hummed from the exertion, keeping her muscles taut and flushing their cells with micro dose painkillers and nutrients. She had her sword up and looked between the two intact fighters, each holding their knives like they were life rafts. She realized abruptly that she was grinning as she prepared to cut them down.
“Scram!” she yelled, and they turned and ran pell-mell away. The dropped baton spun into the pool of spreading blood where it sizzled and crackled. A hot iron smell assaulted her, humid and cloying.
She turned and surveyed the fight that had commenced behind her, four-on-four. Mary was a competent knife fighter, lean and nimble. The Miner studied her and filed the knowledge away for future reference: she knew when to engage, had a feel for the enemy’s reach, and wasn’t afraid to get in close when it made her enemies movements more awkward. Definitely one to watch when things got to their inevitable endgame.
The other three were about what she’d expected: enthusiastic amateurs who did a lot of darting forward and backward, waving their weapons like a single touch would wound. Blue had already been tagged and was bleeding from her left shoulder, but was keeping her opponent off by virtue of standing between the taller Khan and the wall, and waving her makeshift cutlass like a feather duster. The Miner watched for a little while, then waded in sword-first.
“Coming in behind,” she warned, and did just that, gently elbowing aside two of the fighters so as to step neatly between them and take out their opponents with a single V-shaped stroke from left to right, down across a torso and up against a thigh and upper arm. The flashing blade and resulting screams were enough to let the other two overwhelm their foes; Mary’s enemy got the picture and fled, unchased.
“Good,” Mary said, and turned to see the body on the floor behind her and the blood on the deck and wall. She looked a question at the Miner, who swung her sword up once to shake the blood from it in a wide arc spray along the wall, then grabbed a handful of Mary’s jacket to wipe off the rest.
“The hell!”
“Didn’t bring a hankie,” the Miner said, sheathing her weapon. The magnets caught it with a click that made the stooges flinch. She looked down at her gray-green jumpsuit, flecked with blood but not badly stained. It’d come out in the wash. The two she’d cut down last lay groaning on the deck, and the guy with the sledgehammer had gone still. “Should we let someone know about these?”
“Angelica already knows, I promise,” said Mary. “She can deal with her own dead, but we’d better push on before she does. How’s your arm, Blue?”
The scarecrow girl put on a show of toughness, but was weaving from blood loss and pain. The Miner made an impatient noise and poked at the wound, eliciting a high-pitched gasp from between the fighter’s clenched teeth. It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding freely. They managed to scavenge cloth from Sledgehammer’s shirt to tie it up tight, then they hustled away from the intersection before the survivors could bring in reinforcements. Once they were well away from the sight of bodies and smell of blood, the two unwounded stooges started in on how awesome that was, and precisely how much ass it had kicked. Blue walked woodenly, but quietly kept up.
“What all’s down here, anyway?”
Mary glanced at the Miner, suspicious. “Big hydroponics operation. Soy and beans pretty much, and algae and fish. Yeast tanks and bioreactors below that, and reclamation.”
“Your grandfather got a hand in it?”
She shook her head. “It’s neutral ground. Company Rep and McMasters would shit if we made a move, and anyway, there’s no money in it. We pulled out most of what we had in the lower decks, but the geeks down here cooking are too tied into utilities, so we have to keep guards.”
“Seems easy to overrun.”
“Nah, Mr Shine wouldn’t stand for any real fighting. This is just maintaining a presence.”
“Who’s Mr Shine?”
She ignored her. Khan glanced back with a wary look on his face, but then pretended he hadn’t heard.
“What are they cooking, anyway? Amphetamines?” Damn popular among the miners and transport navigators, the kind of people for whom every hour alert and awake meant money.
“All kindsa shit,” Scratch contributed, suddenly enthusiastic. “Meth, smack, reds, dust.”
“Acid,” said Blue.
“Acid,” agreed Scratch. “Coke. Crack.”
“Roofies,�
�� said Khan.
“Roofies. Redeye. Molly. Lizard. Fenty. Thic. All kindsa stuff, and it’s all really cheap right now, on account of the old man can’t move it after Sparks went for Angelica.”
Mary glared at Scratch, but he didn’t see it, then she turned her glare on the Miner. “You don’t need to know details, just don’t get ideas: the geeks down here are ours. You’ll probably pull a protection shift if there’s trouble, but so far Angelica hasn’t touched anyone but the fighters.”
“So the passageways are fair game?”
She gave the Miner a distrustful look, but nodded once.
“But,” the Miner said, “she won’t hit the lab.”
“Right.”
“Because Mr Shine won’t stand for it.”
Again the distrustful look. “Right.”
“And–”
“Where the fuck have you been?” A scruffy woman in leathers leaned out of a hatchway. “You’re fucking la–” She cut herself off and stood up straight when she saw Mary and the Miner trailing the three stooges. “Trouble?”
“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” said Khan. He grinned. “We pissed ’em off pretty good, though, so, you know, you’ll probably all die on the way back.”
The leather-clad woman gave them a worried look, but Mary shook her head. “Come back with us. We’ve got to meet with the reinforcements.”
The Miner raised an eyebrow, and wondered what passed for “reinforcements” on Station 35.
REINFORCEMENTS
Geronimo Rommel stamped back and forth in his tiny shared cabin on the rickety old transport ship he’d spent over a week in, crammed practically shoulder to shoulder with all the lowlifes, misfits, and dimwits Station 32 had coughed up. All the idiots who’d been given a choice between a ticket and the brig, who needed to skip town while something else cooled off, or who just wanted a good old-fashioned fight or some cash. Rommel himself was a professional; he did his fighting for money, thank you, and he had three offers to do just that, which he thought was out-fucking-standing. The trouble was, the transport ship’s captain had just come on the horn and said they were putting into a boarding orbit on Station 35, and he still hadn’t picked one.
“Fuck,” he said aloud.
His two bunkmates had been ignoring him for hours, no matter how much noise he made, and he found that irritating. They were not impressed by his three offers, and he found that even more irritating. Eight days in a tiny cabin with a couple of stuck-up assholes who didn’t recognize their betters just irritated a man. Here he was, a natural leader of men, fresh off yet another lucrative job, with his hand offered in friendship to his fellow mercenaries, and the idiots just snubbed him. He hadn’t even managed to bang any of them, and that irritated him, too.
He pulled his duffel down from the foot of his bunk, the second one up the bulkhead, and slapped it noisily on the communal table. He unzipped it and rummaged to no real purpose, but it gave those jerks a nice view of what he’d brought: an electro-slug rifle, broken down but still pretty obvious; a sawed-off repeating shotgun with bespoke gold inlay on the barrel that read “Gilgamesh” in calligraphic script; two serrated combat knives – he nonchalantly placed one on the table while he rummaged; and a short military-issue tanto blade with a custom embossed gold dragon on the side that looked pretty goddamn wicked. His pad was down at the bottom, where he’d put it before, wrapped in a black shirt. All his clothes were black.
He left the bag ostentatiously gaping as he leaned against the bulkhead, idly swiping through his messages on the gunmetal gray pad. “Three thousand from someone named John Feeney,” he mused half-aloud. “That’s not bad. Or two thousand from Angelica del Rio, with some interesting perks. Hmmm. Or,” he added almost as an afterthought, “thirty-five hundred from some law guy, Thomas McMasters. That’s a tough decision, mates.”
He happened to glance up at the other two guys in the cabin, each lying on their own bunks. The guy on the bottom bunk, Ng, was curled up with his back to the cabin and a pillow wrapped around his head. The guy up on the top bunk, called himself the Bastard, was watching porn again. Morons.
Rommel zipped up his bag, thumbed the lock, then heaved it up onto the middle bunk again. He stuck the knife in his pocket and grabbed the pad and wandered out into the gangway. The transport ship wasn’t that big, and it didn’t take long to reach the galley, passing five more cabins full of assholes. He wondered again how much the captain made on this trip. Twenty-two passengers paying two hundred credits apiece plus meals – at least, he assumed they all paid the same fare; they all got on at Station 32 anyway. He frowned, wondering if anyone else had gotten a cheaper fare than him, whether anyone had gotten more invitations to the captain’s bunk than he had and shaved some credits off, maybe. Didn’t matter, he was getting distracted. Call it forty thousand credits and whatever salable stuff people forgot, or “forgot”, when they got off. There was the captain, an engineer, and a cook who was also a pilot. The ship was former military – while it didn’t smell like cabbage and washed-away puke, its origin was unmistakable – which meant expensive but reliable. He kept trying to do the math in his head for how much profit a guy could make each trip, and how much he’d need to start off, but all the “maybes” and “ballparks” piled up and in the end he wasn’t sure if the captain was a millionaire or deep in debt. He shook his head. A soldier of fortune like himself ought to have a retirement plan, but better not to obsess over it. Be loose, flexible, see what drops in your lap, that was the way to do it.
“I’m thinking Feeney,” said Artemis, a buff chick with no hair anywhere on her, and a fondness for knives. “The guy with the hotel. The del Rio woman with the casino sounds stingy as hell, and I haven’t slept on a proper bed in ages.”
Rommel went for the coffee dispenser, pretending not to listen to the conversation around the galley table. There were a couple of “me too”s.
“Nix,” came the first dissent, a gangly gunman named Huey with some really interesting implants that gave tiny electric shocks. “Ever seen how casinos are built? Cameras and stuff everywhere, those places are locked down tighter than prisons. Maybe it pays less, but I call that a safe gig, me.”
“Then we ain’t supposed to ‘fraternize’ anymore,” Artemis said, waggling her forehead where her eyebrows would’ve been.
“Didn’t sign nothing yet,” Huey said with a leer. “You want to go… counter-offer?”
Rommel lost track of that conversation when a couple more people going for Angelica del Rio started to explain themselves too, all at the same time.
“Anyone going for this McMasters guy?” he called out.
Two cautious hands went up, a guy and a girl he didn’t know by name. He studied their sheepish faces and just grunted.
Nobody asked him in turn as he poured his lousy coffee, and that was just as well since he didn’t really have an answer yet anyway. The slow realization that they’d all, or almost all, gotten three offers annoyed him. He tried casually to peer over shoulders at pads, wristmons, and ink on hands, and at least he’d been offered more than them. A lot more than some of them. A few probably wouldn’t even make back the cost of the trip.
He stood back, sipped the thin mud pissed out by the machine and frowned at the room. They’d spent the whole week boasting about their fighting skills, and as someone who had actually seen combat he had mostly considered it idle chatter. But now that the ship full of miscellaneous mercenaries was actually at its destination he gave them a second look and wasn’t sure what he saw. They were amateurs, most of them. A few had unit or platoon tats, but none of them looked authentic. Still, they were all pretty athletic, and looked like scrappers. Some wiry, some beefy. He could take them down if he had to or wanted to, but some of them would go down hard, he had to admit. Trouble was, there was no telling where they’d go to, or who he’d wind up fighting. No rhyme or reason to who got offers from the gangs or from security. Hell of a place, this Station 35.
Something else b
othered him. He’d gotten desperately bored enough to look at the telescope view of the station, and he recognized a beat-up old mining ship that he was pretty sure belonged to a beat-up old intelligence corps officer who flipped the ’verse two birds at the end of her last mission and went off to work the remotest patch she could find. He didn’t want to cross her path if he could avoid it, that was a lethal kind of mistake even for a badass like him. Probably she wasn’t involved, but if she was, who was she in with? Security, probably, knowing her. Probably. He remembered something else about her: she’d taught him about this guy Sun Tzu, who said, “if you know your enemy and you know yourself, you have nothing to worry about.” Or something like that. With all these “probablys” stacking up, though, he was starting to feel like he didn’t know shit.
No two ways about it, all his instincts told him this was a bad job.
“Hey.” The captain showed up in the hatchway. She had a worried look on her face, and her eyes were scanning the room. “Just so you know. Chief of Security on this station just gave me a heads-up that there’s a blanket firearms ban on Station 35. Anything that shoots, gets confiscated. Anyone who tries to smuggle onboard anything that shoots, gets spaced.”
She put her hands up like she could quell the shouts of outrage. Rommel frowned hard. Gilgamesh had set him back two whole jobs’ worth of profits, and it was worth a lot more than that after his mods. It had saved his sorry ass on at least three occasions.
“Don’t bitch at me, it’s not my rule. Take it up with McMustard or whoever he is. What?”
“What if we go to work for McMasters?” some kid asked. “He’s the security guy right? Or is that Feeney?”
“He didn’t say. Ask him yourself; we’re on the station network now, so there’s no comm fees.” She folded her arms and unfolded them again. “Look, I’m no arms dealer and I don’t want to be. But anything you want to sell me, I’ll try to pay a fair price. It’s that or take your chances, that’s as good as I can give you, all right?”
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