Red Noise

by John P. Murphy

  Rommel watched the groaning crowd and caught the arm of a good-looking tough guy with no neck. Fergus, was that what he called himself? Looked and talked like he might plausibly have been ex-military, too. “Hey,” Rommel murmured. “Did I hear you say you hadn’t gotten an offer from McMasters?”

  “What’s it to you?” the guy rumbled.

  “I think that stinks,” Rommel said, keeping his voice low and his smile friendly. “And I got a proposition for you.”

  MURDER, MAYBE?

  Mary led the way back and didn’t seem to notice or mind that the Miner lagged behind. She watched Feeney’s granddaughter, flanked by three tired toughs, as she navigated back passages through a circuitous route that would probably avoid trouble. Deck six was down deep in the station, close to what she thought was Mr Shine’s territory, him and his people who called themselves Morlocks, but she didn’t see much evidence that anyone still lived or worked there.

  The Miner mused as she walked, decided one option was to come back that night. 3am station time, maybe, if everyone was asleep. Explosives would do the trick. Nice empty corner of the station. Relieve the guards – they’d believe Feeney would send just her to relieve three of them, at least they’d believe it long enough for her to take care of them. Take care of the chem geeks. Set the explosives somewhere impressive but safe. Safe-ish. Work of an hour, and she’d be back at the hotel ready to help the enraged old man get his revenge on “that witch”.

  The Miner didn’t ask what route they were taking, and Mary didn’t explain. She played the good little bodyguard, watching the boss’s granddaughter because the others were too tired, stupid, and feckless to. She found herself tempted. Off Mary Feeney, and it would drive John Feeney spare. From idle talk she’d gathered that his family was his one major weakness. If he thought Angelica’s goons had done her, or grabbed her, whatever peace there was would be over. Herrera would have his excuse pretty damn fast. It might solve the McMasters problem, too: either the mustachioed twerp would get steamrolled, or he’d sense the change in the wind and do his damn job.

  She liked the idea, liked it a lot, and yet somehow found herself not murdering anyone. The five of them walked briskly but quietly, and all seemed to keep breathing.

  Her first rationalization was that Feeney going spare might go way over the top. Might even flat-out win. But that was nonsense; she could handle him, if by no other way than through switching sides.

  Her second rationalization was that despite herself, she liked Mary Feeney. The kid was too clever by half, and even kind of fun when she had a drink and loosened up. But she was also an enthusiastic and capable part of a criminal gang that had destroyed a lot of lives and livelihoods. She was more serious than her blustering and fickle grandfather, which made her dangerous as hell. Anyway, the Miner had met a lot of corrupt SOBs in her time behind enemy lines. She’d liked them too, and knew not to get sentimental. Besides, she also liked Takata and Herrera, and this was their home, too.

  Her third rationalization, probably the real one, was harder to express to herself. She’d killed in cold blood before, sure. She’d killed for flag and country and other bullshit; she’d killed to survive and for advantage. And then she’d bought a ship and some mining equipment, and set herself to a life alone with plants, books, and rocks. Yeah, it was also before getting ripped off by some little toads and coming face to face with a lot of people who really had it coming. But if she wanted to just kill people, she could make a hell of a lot more money just doing that. She was giving the toads a chance, at least. It might not be a fair fight, but it never was.

  She continued to ponder her ethical position, until Mary stopped abruptly with one finger in the air. All it would take is a couple more steps, pretend to not be paying attention, to be caught up short, then have her sword out and cut them down before they knew what was happening. Her sword stayed sheathed, and she halted in her tracks.

  “Good news,” Mary said. She turned and smiled. “Transport ship’s in, and we managed to hire about half the crop.”

  The Miner frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “We made offers to everyone aboard, crew included. A bunch of them signed up.”

  “How many?”

  Mary smirked. “Afraid of the competition? Too many and not enough. You want to count them, get moving.” She paused, giving the Miner a speculative look. “Why don’t you take the lead.”

  GERONIMO ROMMELS

  The transport ship airlock finished its cycle while the assemblage of aspiring goons loitered with duffle bags slung over shoulders and bored looks masking varying stages of anxiety. Gases whooshed through tubes and vents, heavy metal doors slammed together and squealed as unlubricated areas dragged. When the massive doors finally opened, light poured in from the dock to frame a mustachioed blonde man in a black uniform with his hands behind his back.

  Black-uniformed guards rushed up to them and began a hurried search. Patdowns, detector wands, straight-up opening and rifling bags. Knives, swords, drugs, were left alone. The new arrivals snarled and grumbled, but they’d been warned to expect it, and at least it went fast. Security moved from front to back haphazardly, searching some people twice and others not at all, and more than one of the fighters kicked themselves for not trying to smuggle their guns through.

  “Welcome to Captain John Wayne Koganusan Station,” the man barked in a less than welcoming manner as his crew retreated behind him. Rommel recognized the clear signs of stick-up-ass syndrome. “I cannot by Anaconda Consolidated policy prevent you from boarding this station, but I can damn well make sure you know and obey my rules.”

  At that point, every attention wandered, and nobody – including the man’s own fidgeting, nose-picking honor guard – heard his lengthy lecture about fighting, gunplay, and getting spaced. They’d each gotten their own instructions, anyway, which had included (from Feeney) “don’t piss off McMasters, just smile and nod until he finally shuts up, don’t bring a gun aboard, and get yourself to my hotel as soon as you can.” Or (from Angelica) “Ignore the lecture from station security. Sell your firearms before boarding the station if you can; otherwise write them off as a loss. Come singly or in pairs to the Lady Luck Casino without attracting undue attention.” The few who had gained employment with McMasters himself were told, “I will provide an edifying lecture on station security rules and procedures; you need not attend to it yourself, as it does not apply to you, but pay close attention to make sure the others do.”

  Geronimo Rommel scratched his ass while he listened to the more-interesting drone of a ventilation fan with a bad bearing that kind of had an off-kilter on-again off-again rattle a little like a tiny drum solo. He hefted a duffle bag that barely concealed a stolen fire axe, wrapped in his underwear so that he figured nobody would investigate too closely. He was pretty sure that was a genius move, the most recent of several, and congratulated himself on it again as he walked as nonchalantly as a badass like him could with the group heading for the Ad Astra hotel. Three thousand credits, here he came.

  Geronimo Rommel, meanwhile, grinned like an idiot and shuffled his way toward the casino through the galleria, glancing up at all the other fighters trying – and failing, ha! – to look inconspicuous as they moseyed out with him toward del Rio’s meeting point. He glanced over at that McMasters guy, who kinda fumed and tried to glare in every direction at once.

  Finally, only two toughs remained standing in the port. A rough-looking woman with a shotgun openly displayed on her shoulder. Despite a natural disinclination to hard thinking, Rommel was carefully considering his position. He ran his hand over his head in a sheepish gesture, then on an impulse offered it to McMasters to shake. “Geronimo,” he rumbled, talking slowly as though unfamiliar with the shape of the word. “At your service. Only, I go by Fergus Capper, if you don’t mind. A guy like me can’t be too careful with his real name.”

  McMasters hesitated before taking it, then pumped it with some enthusiasm. “Of course, of course,
Mr ‘Capper’. I got your message, I merely forgot. Good to have another military man on the crew.” He stopped and stepped back to get a better look at them, his face reflecting conflicted thoughts. “Two’s enough,” he said aloud, and obviously didn’t believe it. “The cream of the crop, anyway. You must be Sinthia, then? Welcome, both of you. Let’s get you into uniform and on the roster.”

  Rommel lay back on his bunk, the only bunk in one of the transport ship’s few private cabins. He counted his credits again and reminded himself that two thousand profit for doing nothing but staying on board a ship for a couple weeks without risking his hide or his guns, that was worth some cabin fever. Let those other three jerks take the risks, if they were so keen to get their fight on. That Sun Tzu guy said to fight if circumstances were favorable, and if they weren’t… well, all right, he didn’t explicitly say to sell your identity three times and run away if circumstances sucked, but Rommel felt that the old buzzard would have approved.

  He just had a single moment of doubt, wondering what would happen when his old friend on the mining ship got wind he’d been in the area. Might have been friendly to say hi, maybe. But he had to grin at the idea of her stumbling on one of those chumps wearing his own illustrious name. He wondered which one it would be.

  The docking clamps finally released with hull-shaking thumps. His smile broadened as he listened to the chatter of a handful of voices relieved at getting the hell off Station 35. They sounded tense. Unhappy. In need of some relaxation. They needed a good solid dose of Vitamin R, of which he, Geronimo Rommel, was the universe’s only source.

  A JOB

  “Jane!” Feeney leaned over the stairway to loom above the small crowd. The newcomers had shuffled in full of anxious bravado and been introduced around. Looked like a half-dozen new fighters, bedraggled and lean from the long spaceflight. The dregs and leftovers of the grimiest stations, washed out of some navy or merchant fleet, or on the run. Bloodshot dark-ringed eyes full of cunning, fingers always straying toward weapons. The Miner had been sitting, bored, as the various goons, new and old, tried their best to impress each other with stories about their martial and sexual prowess on the one hand and pharmaceutical tolerance on the other. One grinning moron crowed that he’d saved up and was having a chainsaw printed.

  Feeney located her and fixed his eyes down on her from the railing. “Lend me one of your expensive hands, won’t you? One of my generous supporters isn’t feeling so forthcoming. Whyn’t you take a couple of my new boys and girls and go put this gentleman in the giving mood?”

  The Miner scratched her neck, feeling a weight in the pit of her stomach. “Who?”

  “Man named Peder Finn, a few decks down. Does some distilling. He used to share his profits like a good little boy, and I always rewarded him with brisk business, very brisk. But lately, not a credit...”

  Feeney’s smiling face had some tightness behind it, she thought. Angry at something. When she’d stared back at him long enough that he looked like he might say something, she nodded once to acknowledge the order.

  That name rang a bell, and the association with booze clinched it. She’d liked Finn, but cover was cover. “You, you, you,” she said, pointing out three seedy, rough, and less-than toothy specimens, ones who’d been boasting about busting heads and robbing locals. She had no idea if they were new or not. “Can you beat someone up without killing him?”

  They exchanged lazy amused looks. “Probably not,” the short pimply one said with a leer.

  “Good enough.”

  The Miner walked so fast they had to jump to keep up. She took the service exit into the back halls, then the back doors into the big circular corridor that Blue, Khan and the others had led her through. She wasn’t totally sure of the route, but she mumbled something about avoiding patrols, and that was apparently enough to bluff the three clowns into thinking she knew where she was going. Anyway, she had a map in her heads-up display now, and the roundabout route gave her time to think.

  They grumbled about her decision to take an elevator down – Mary had drilled into them that they were ambush risks, and while she admired the tactical thinking, she was firm. “Anyone dumb enough to mess with the four of us, they’ll get what’s coming.” That seemed to mollify them. She wanted time to think and look, and from the back of the elevator she finally got a good view of her three companions.

  The biggest and meanest of the three, the guy who’d boasted about being on the run for killing three people, carried a kind of mace-looking weapon that looked like it’d been printed from a medieval recreation catalogue. It had a fat four-sided metal head with sharpened corners. His bare arms had some serious muscle to them, but she thought he looked like a gym rat more than a fighter: strong, but slow.

  The skinny nervous-looking one looked to be a knife-fighter, maybe even a good one. She was on some kind of stimulant, judging by the way her eyes darted, pupils narrowed to dots, and she couldn’t keep her long nimble fingers off her knives. She kept half-unsheathing them, showing a couple centimeters of scratched and pitted blade, then shoving them back in.

  The last one, short and pimply, had a fire axe that reminded her of that punk of Angelica’s she’d had to kill. The axe wasn’t sharpened and it looked like it hadn’t been used, but he fingered its edge with a dreamy look, and she remembered he’d told a story of beating the shit out of a lawyer like it was the funniest thing in the world. The goons had cackled as he’d stumblingly relayed how he’d demanded “the password” off the poor jerk who tried to insist it was some kind of mistake.

  Two slow fighters, she decided, with maybe some power behind them, and one quick one.

  “Looking forward to a proper fight?” The Miner forced some cheer into her voice.

  “Damn right,” said the mace-wielder. He spun the weapon in his hand so that the sharpened edges caught the wan industrial light. “All this tiptoeing around, not wanting to make waves around that security fucker who took my guns. Makes me puke.”

  The other two made approving noises and offered sage observations such as “fuck that guy”, and the Miner nodded. They’d all been on edge, and she could tell her own presence keyed them up worse. The elevator lurched as it halted, making her drop into a crouch, and the doors shuddered open. She tried not to think about how long it had been since it’d seen any kind of maintenance, even before the fighting started. Of course, anything that put it out of commission would knock out gravity too, she was pretty sure. Probably. She ushered her crew out quickly.

  The heads-up map showed a couple twists to the corridor, with Finn’s compartment taking up a good chunk of reconfigured space well ahead. They walked for a minute before the Miner raised her hand and brought the company to a halt. It was a good spot, without sight lines in most directions thanks to those twists in the corridor and a strangely built-out living compartment. No hatches in sight. They’d passed a few security cameras, most obviously defunct, but there weren’t any in view here.

  “Something seems off,” she said. They looked at her with naked apprehension. She pointed to the guy with the axe. “I don’t like it. Go up ahead and check it out. Don’t run, don’t fight. Just walk out, look, and come right back. Go slow.”

  He looked relieved when she said “don’t fight”, and when she finished her instruction he nodded sharply and turned the corner. With him gone, she visibly relaxed and turned to the guy with the mace. “That’s a hell of a weapon,” she said. “While we’re waiting, you mind if I take a swing?”

  He grinned broadly, showing gaps and broken teeth and sharing some impressively bad breath. “If you think you can lift it.” He hefted it one-handed and she dutifully gave it a dubious look. She eyed it up and down, to his evident amusement.

  “Hold this,” she told the knife fighter, who had to quickly put her knives away in order to take the Miner’s sheathed sword with the clasp locked. Freed of that, the Miner made a show of stretching both hands and accepted the mace. It was heavy enough as it was, but sh
e exaggerated its heft and the two goons laughed as she let it almost hit the deck. She grinned good-naturedly, feeling familiar tightness and warmth in her elbows, wrists, and shoulders as her augments gave her a little extra strength. Not much, just a notice that they’d been engaged, a friendly warning that if she overdid it they’d tear her muscles, stretch her tendons, and snap her ligaments like forgotten dock tethers.

  The mace’s owner chuckled as she visibly struggled to lift the weapon upright, and she showed her genuine appreciation for the craft that went into the weapon. It was newly printed, she saw, and well-balanced. She raised it unsteadily, then turned and smashed the knife fighter on the top of her head, bringing it down as hard as her augments could manage, then spun and slammed the butt of the weapon into its owner’s gut.

  Tossing the mace, she pulled the knife from its scabbard on her thigh, and drove the blade into the man’s throat. They died with a clatter but no other noise, and she had to step back fast from the rapidly-spreading blood. She grabbed her sword back and after a moment plucked the mace one-handed from the path of the blood, marveling at the impressive dent it had put in the deck. Then she stood at the corner.

  She waited, heart pounding and listening hard until she heard faint steps. When the punk turned the corner, she brained him too.

  After taking a moment to breathe and collect herself, the Miner leaned over the blood to put the mace next to its owner’s hand, swapped out the knife in his neck for one off the knife-fighter’s jacket, then sprinted for the elevator. She hated to put herself in that contraption again, but it gave her a minute to examine herself, wipe some blood spatter from her face and hands, clean and sheathe the knife, and put on a properly bored expression. She got into her computer’s messaging system and dictated a few quick alterations. By then the doors opened and she needed to start walking.