“I don’t think they’ve figured that out.”
Feeney’s frown twisted like he was sucking his teeth. “Where’s Mick?”
“Who?”
“That girl I hired, with the sword. Jane. You said she pushed them off from the doctor’s, but I don’t see her down there.”
“Dunno. I never saw her this morning, I just heard she’d chased away Angelica’s people.”
He made unsatisfied noises. “Well.” He went back to scanning the milling crowd below. “What’s your name?”
“Corbell,” Screwball said. Feeney glanced at him, confused for a second.
“Corbell... Corbell...” The old man frowned, still staring down at the two crows facing off below.
Screwball sighed quietly. “Some of them call me Scre–”
“Oh, Screwball! That’s right, yes, yes.” Feeney grinned like he’d won a treat and winked. “Senior moment. They say there’s nobody so dangerous as an old gangster, but old is old, eh?”
Screwball tried to grin as his mind worked furiously around the trap in that question. “You’re still sharp enough to cut, sir.”
“Eh, nobody likes a brownnoser.” Feeney concentrated on the galleria, and Screwball was glad for the distraction. The crowd had grown and the two sides were slowly moving toward each other. It was like watching waves lap at the sides of a filling waste tank, moving back and forth while inching forward. The crowd grew as wanderers and stragglers from both sides showed up, pushing the front lines toward each other.
“Getting serious,” Feeney murmured. “Where the hell’s McMasters? Ought to be putting a stop to it. Or Angelica. Rotten traitor ought to know better than to allow a fight in the damned galleria. And where’s Jane?”
“Maybe distracting McMasters?”
Feeney didn’t respond right away, but he looked worried. “She would,” he admitted. “She would at that.” He turned around to see a half dozen more of his fighters rubbernecking for a view of the simmering crowd.
“And what the hell are you doing up here? Get down there, what am I paying you for?” They all but fell over each other in their stumbling rush down the stairs. Weapons were out below on both sides. “I don’t want a fight right now,” Feeney muttered, “but I’ll be damned if I lose one. Where’s Jane?”
Screwball reluctantly sagged his shoulders and made to join the crowd, but Feeney clamped a cold bony hand on his arm. “Not you, Corbell. Leaving me without a guard up here, what’s the matter with you?”
“Sorry sir,” he said brightly. “Just eager to help, is all.”
Feeney grunted. “I don’t want suicidals, boy. No place for a man without common sense.”
Screwball bit his lip, couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t get his head bitten off, and stayed quiet. He watched the fighters below menace each other. It was like some kind of ritual dance: forward, wave something sharp and yell, then stumble back again when their counterpart did the same. Shouts of mingled anger and terror filled the galleria. The result wasn’t inevitable in its particulars, only in its effect: Yarbles inexpertly swung a nunchuck and hit himself in the face. Screaming and bleeding, he went down, and the battle was joined.
THIRSTY WORK
The lamps had come up to part “sun”, making it morning, in theory. A couple more of Feeney’s other goons had woken up and had casually drifted toward the little standoff that had slowly formed after the scene at the doctor’s. A few heads popped up in the casino windows, and a couple fighters came out even if most of them were just watching. They were itching for a fight, and she could see the guard in front of the security station nervously looking back and forth. She’d woken the place up nicely, the Miner decided, but she needed information. She took the corridor to the back passage before things got too hot, and took the long walk around behind the hotel to the spur next to Ama no Gawa. By the time she got back to the galleria the long way round, things had heated up: not an outright fight yet, but with maybe a dozen wary thugs facing off already. She slipped unnoticed into Ama no Gawa’s open door, where she was greeted with a hearty “Fuck off!” from Takata.
“Morning,” the Miner replied.
“You’re no better than those other hooligans! Get out of my restaurant.”
“Hello, Herrera.”
“They’re still alive,” Herrera told his glass mournfully. She wondered if he’d slept in the booth. “You don’t get the hundred thousand unless you kill every last one of those bot-fucking syphilis reservoirs.”
“Language!” Takata scolded. “See what you do to him? You get his hopes up and he starts swearing. They’re going to kill each other out there and knock everything down. Get out of here. Fly off to some other station and do your mischief there.”
“Can’t. Feeney’s got the docking clamps on my ship.”
“Eh? Hah! Serves you right, you play with fire like that.”
The Miner didn’t sit, since she wasn’t invited to. She stood with her hands folded on the back of a chair, her sword out of the way. She looked Takata in the eye, and he looked right back. “I’m sorry to bother you. I need information.”
“Like what?”
“I have to know about this guy Nuke.”
Herrera said something unintelligibly angry into his glass.
“That son of a bitch,” Takata spat. “He was a bigger bastard than all of them put together. Crazy fucker, too.”
“They’re all crazy.”
“Not like this guy. You know why they call him Nuke? Old man Feeney scoured this place years ago, stole all the stuff the military left behind. Found a stash of pocket nukes down in the asteroid rock, what they used to blast it out in the first place, figured he could sell them. Except his grandson Wilfred gets hold of one, see? Gets the fucked-up idea to have it implanted in his chest, wired up to his heart. If his heart stops, everything around him gets vaporized.”
The Miner stood, stunned. She’d had the misfortune to have to place a couple of those, and they scared the shit out of her. They were the size of a large fist and had a variable yield, around half a ton. They could easily take out armored hulls, especially from the inside.
“It’s all messed up and ugly,” Takata was saying, “looks like some kind of robot’s trying to push out of his chest. He goes bare-chested too so everyone has to stare at the nasty thing.”
“Christ,” she managed.
Herrera looked up. “What did you call him? It was pretty good.” Takata waved him off, irritated. “Yeah, you said he was a ‘militant solipsist’. Pretty good, I thought. I think it’s funny.”
“It’s not funny, it’s a fucking nightmare. That son of a bitch is what started this whole thing,” he told the Miner. “See, Angelica used to be Feeney’s lieutenant, like his top soldier, but she freaked out when Nuke got that thing put in his chest. She told the old man his grandson was nuts and she wouldn’t stand for it, got a bunch of the others to go along with her. They forced him to deal with the little psycho, eventually, but by then half of them were fed up and revolted.” He waved his hand at the galleria. “This is the result.”
“How’d they deal with him?”
Takata shrugged.
“Is he dead?”
“No idea. I’m just glad he’s gone. Guy scared the crap out of me.”
“Is he likely to come back?”
“Wish I knew.”
The conversation lulled, so they could hear when the yelling started up. The Miner wandered over to the big window and watched as the two opposing groups finally made tentative steps toward actually fighting. Knives, bars, electrified truncheons all waved uncertainly in the air above two scraggly groups. Maybe a dozen on each side by then. They still weren’t fighting yet, just menacing each other. A step forward on one side, a step forward on the other side, then back again, almost choreographed.
She’d barely registered Takata coming up to join her, and shot him a confused look when he pushed a glass of beer into her hand. By way of explanation, he pointed his c
hin at a red-faced McMasters advancing on the restaurant’s front door from behind the crowd of Angelica’s goons.
“You did this!” He had his finger already deployed when he walked in the door, his mustache quivering in fury, and he pointed it right in her face. The Miner lifted the glass to her lips and sipped, regarded him coolly. It took every ounce of self-control not to react to the stale, warm, flat liquid. Touché, she thought.
“Did what?”
“I saw you watching and conniving and… and… orchestrating this gratuitous display!”
“I don’t know how to orchestrate. I’m just having a beer,” she said, holding up the proof.
As near she could tell, the first one down knocked himself silly and fell into the plants, but that was all it took. They fell on each other, an ungainly mass of arms and legs and heads, mostly screaming in fury and terror. A tough went down clutching an abdominal wound, and another reeled drunkenly away from the melee bleeding from the scalp. Having met in combat, both sides were busy trying desperately to unmeet again, the panicked jerks on the front lines pushing back against their own comrades pressing forward.
They’d just managed to disengage themselves when a dozen security goons flew out of their station, attempting to look tough but failing as they tried to swarm and pull on their black armor at the same time. They had their stun batons out, though, and had the drop on the terrified gangsters. Twelve batons pumped up and down mechanically, hitting exposed flesh as hard as they could. The Miner figured they did more damage to the fighters than the fighters had done to each other. There wasn’t much resistance to it, and they’d timed their arrival so they’d get to bust heads without actually endangering themselves.
“You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” McMasters yelled over the noise of the melee when he finally managed to break his attention away. “This is deliberate! You’re deliberately disturbing the peace on this station, and I won’t stand for it. I tell you I won’t!”
“Looked to me like you were doing a fine job with the gratuitous display yourself. I noticed your people didn’t bother to come bust up the fight until it was already mostly over.”
He pursed his lips, making his little blonde mustache bristle. “What are you insinuating?”
The fight was breaking up behind him as fast as it could. McMasters’ forces pursued anyone upright, chasing them away as the injured fighters in the middle scrambled in every which direction. One of them made for the bar, but the Miner put her hand on her sword and scared her off.
“I don’t know how to insinuate, either,” the Miner said. “I just meant that your goon squad’s made up of cowards who enjoy beating people up as long as it isn’t too hard.”
He probably wished he hadn’t let his face get so red on the way over, she decided, because there was nowhere left to go from there. He glowered at Takata and Herrera, which had the virtue of letting him ignore her. It gave him time to think, but he still only came up with, “I’ve got my eye on you.” The Miner thought she deserved a better class of cliché, but also decided that Takata didn’t deserve blood on his floor.
McMasters looked past her at the bartender. “If you expect my officers to spend money in your bar, you’d better do something about your roach problem.”
He stormed back out again and yelled at Mary, who had appeared from somewhere and was busy pulling someone out of the pile. Her rescuee waved a knife and posed more of a harm to his rescuer first and himself second than anyone he might have actually wanted to stab.
“Shitstache thinks I’m behind this,” Herrera said, and didn’t sound unhappy about it.
“Why?”
“Because if he loses control, I get to try again to cancel Anaconda’s lease. Then his pustulous hide and goat-bile mustache are space-bound.”
“There’ll be others,” Takata said. “You knock one down, there’s another one waiting to take his place. Maybe her.”
The Miner shook her head. “Not my gig,” she said.
“Says you.”
They were both quiet for a long time.
“Sorry about losing you business,” she said without looking away from the melee.
Takata snorted, but she didn’t believe the put-on of disdain. He looked uncomfortable. “He thinks he has enough sway to keep his crooked crew of morons from drinking? I’d like to see him try.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so kept her mouth shut and thought back to the fight. It had been worthwhile, she thought. The gangsters were too drunk and sleepy to really do each other damage, and it was probably a wash. She’d hoped to see how McMasters’ crew deployed themselves in a fight, though, and hadn’t been disappointed.
All huddled in their spider hole security station to armor up, they’d poured out of two doors – the kind of deployment that could get stoppered long enough to get a good solid fight underway. They were cowards, it seemed, but bloodthirsty ones. She could work with that.
The trick would be timing. The two hornets’ nests could be stirred up pretty fast if they were mostly awake. Middle of the night might be worth trying anyway – Feeney felt most confident when he thought he was pulling something off, and Angelica seemed paranoid down to her bones, enough to keep a sharper watch at night. As for McMasters, she had no idea what his response time in the wee hours looked like, but probably faster than early morning. It would be better, she decided, if the security crew were in their station rather than streaming in from quarters – they’d be right on the scene and ready to organize, but more easily contained. She didn’t know enough about their off-duty movements as she liked, and since they weren’t usually in Ama no Gawa, she wondered.
“They don’t like to pay is the trouble,” Takata admitted when she asked. “McMasters pays shit. He’s got some kind of deal with Mr Shine or Finn for raw booze, and they drink in their barracks or the security station most of the time. They only come here when they’re bored.” He looked uncomfortable again.
“Mr Shine. What do you think of him?”
“He’s all right. Kind of a coward. Tried to stay neutral when the old man and Angelica really went at it, and look where it got him.”
“I’m looking. Where did it get him?”
Takata scowled. “Nobody likes a smartass. It got him kicked out of his casino. He got his claws into the physical plant now, a whole slew of people who were only ever half-heartedly corrupt. Casual like. You know, got the occasional kickback for providing water or power to the drug lab, but never really cared.”
The Miner considered that. “He have many of his own fighters, those Morlocks you mentioned?”
“Not what you’d call fighters. Dishwashers and blackjack dealers, and the people who ran the machinery. The old man and Angelica leave him alone because they figure he could play kingmaker if he wanted to. They respect him when he tells them to lay off someone like Doc Mills.”
“He protect you too?”
He shook his head. “He makes sure I get water and power, but I pay for it.” He grinned. “Everyone kinda thinks I’m being protected by someone else, I think. I don’t rock the boat.”
“That why you let McMasters’ goons drink here?”
Takata scowled. “It’s because he’s a coward!” Herrera contributed.
“Oh, to hell with you, Herrera. You’ve got a salary no matter who you spite. I’ve got a business to keep open.”
“‘Open’ you call it. You sell watery expired piss beer to thugs and drifters, and you alternate between ripping ’em off and giving it away.”
“I’ve got the good stuff, too,” Takata said. “I never give you the shit, just the people who have it coming.”
The Miner looked down at the glass in her hand, at the tiny bubbles rising in the pale yellow liquid. Takata looked defensive. “What, you’re going to argue?”
“No.”
Takata’s defensive look didn’t entirely go away, but he added a shade of guilty to the palette. “Look, I gotta get my kicks in where I can.”
AFTERMATH
Screwball hadn’t left the old man’s side through the whole fight, and maybe that hadn’t been all that long, but it was a couple minutes more attention than he’d ever gotten before, and Feeney had remembered his real name. Plus, even with the fighting over, the old guy seemed kinda loath to send him away. Screwball could picture himself as the bodyguard type. Quiet, menacing, dependable.
“Corbell.”
“Sir?” He felt like his voice was deeper than usual, projected kind of a calm competence.
“You’re hovering. Piss off. Oh, Mary! Are you all right, my dear?”
Screwball backed away a few steps, right into a pillar, and tried to coolly take his absence. Feeney’s granddaughter looked like hell. She had a big blossoming bruise under the row of spikes along her cheekbone, and a dark line on her lip where it had split and just stopped bleeding down the front of her black jacket, which was still wet with it.
“What the hell was that?” Mary demanded. “I went to look in on the cooks, and when I come back you’ve started a war!”
Feeney waved off her anger with a single thin hand. “You’ve got it all wrong, child. This was an organic fight, Angelica’s fault. She tried to claim the doctor, and by God we fought back!”
Mary frowned and folded her arms. If she noticed Screwball trying to look insignificant while dying of curiosity, she didn’t show it. “Doctor’s neutral ground.”
“Of course. And we showed her.”
“Stupid to fight in the galleria.”
Feeney raised his chin. “My soldiers fight where the fight finds them.”
Screwball tried not to stare. The last fifteen minutes, the old man had been muttering about how stupid the whole thing was, and why wasn’t McMasters breaking the fight up yet. And now he sounded like he’d won some kind of daring victory. Mary just raised an eyebrow. If she was going to say anything, though, it was lost when the old man suddenly went red and shouted, “And just where the hell have you been?”
Red Noise Page 15