The new hire slowed and stopped with her left hand resting on the handle of her sword like it was a chair arm. Her gray jumpsuit was spattered and smeared with blood, as was her right hand, which she used to casually guide a lock of salt and pepper hair back behind her ear. She gave Feeney a mild surprised look, like Ditz always did but without the heavy sedatives.
Feeney didn’t wait for an answer. “You weren’t fighting.”
She nodded. “That’s right. Except for the doctor’s office, I didn’t touch them, I promise. I figure the thing with the doctor was a special case, since that’s supposed to be neutral ground. But I stayed away after that, honest.”
Even Mary looked wrongfooted by that, and Feeney just gaped for a moment. “Well, what were you doing, then?”
“Distracting McMasters. Giving your people a chance to do some damage before he called in the clowns. Proving you hadn’t ordered the fight.” Her mild look fell into a grin. “If you had, I’d have been in it, right? So he can’t blame you for it.”
Mary shot the older woman a look of contempt, the kind of look that would have made Screwball shrivel up. It turned to dismay when she saw Feeney puff himself up.
“We did all right, we did all right. Could have used that sword of yours, sure, but I’d say we gave as good as we got.”
“Two dead,” Mary growled. “Five cut up or beat up bad enough they can’t fight.”
Feeney hesitated. “Us or them, do you mean?”
“Us!” When he looked the obvious question, she unclenched her teeth enough to say, “I don’t know how bad they got it.”
“Such an Eeyore,” Feeney said. “It looked to me that we knocked down twice as many as all that. I think–”
He was interrupted by groans and cries of pain from the group crowding the entrance. McMasters and eight black-armored security guards muscled their way through with their stun batons crackling. McMasters glared up at Feeney, angrier than Screwball had ever imagined he could be. Everyone looked tense and ready for a fight except that chick Jane, who just leaned against a column looking bored.
“I warned you, John Feeney,” McMasters barked. “I warned you, and by God you’ve put your foot in it. If you think I’m staying neutral in your little fight with del Rio after this, you’re bloody well mistaken!”
“Now wait one moment,” Feeney stammered. All the blood had gone out of him and he looked like a ghost. All his soldiers fell quiet and listened. “That’s just not true. Angelica violated your neutrality–”
“She–” Here he pointed at Jane, who reacted with a single raised eyebrow. “She cut down one of Angelica’s soldiers right on Joff’s damn doorstep. And she works for you, Feeney.”
“No, I don’t.”
“And she… What?” Wrongfooted, he whirled on her. “What did you say?”
“I said, I don’t work for him.” She pushed herself off the column squarely onto both feet, and rested her hand on her sword. “He fired me. I gave his money back. I don’t work for him. I can keep rephrasing it, if you’re confused.”
“Bullshit.”
Feeney suddenly looked a little less at sea. He pulled a small pad from his pocket, and seemed to steel himself before looking at it. When he looked back up at McMasters, he smiled like he’d just rolled double-sixes. He handed the pad to McMasters and said, “It’s true, see for yourself.”
The security man snatched it from him. “Who the blazes is Mickey–” He fell silent. “This was only timestamped two minutes ago!”
“I only agreed to give it back two minutes ago. That way I don’t owe him anything.” She looked right at the old bird when she said that, and he went pale. “That’s what we were talking about when you interrupted us.”
Feeney didn’t miss a beat. “Well, after all, she started a fight, didn’t she? That’s not what I was paying for, I only wanted protection from Angelica, that’s all I ever hired any of these fine folks to do, not to start a war.” The color came back into his face as the bullshit flowed. “She picked a fight in the goddamned galleria, though, and she had to go. Did I do wrong, Tom?”
McMasters’ eyes bulged and Screwball thought he’d stroke out. His eight armored guards exchanged glances, and the crowd behind them murmured. “No,” he finally managed. He jabbed an accusing finger. “But you damned well better see that she stays fired, do you hear me?” He whirled. “And you, you’d better get the hell off my station.”
“Can’t,” she drawled. “I’m broke now. Are you going to pay for my fuel? It’ll cost a few grand.”
“The hell it will!”
She shrugged. “Seems to me that you want me to go pretty far away. Takes a lot of fuel.”
If McMasters had an answer, she didn’t stay to hear it. She started walking toward the hotel entrance, and they stumbled over each other to clear the way for her. Screwball stared as she walked, dumbfounded.
“Well, Tom,” Feeney said, the first as usual to find his tongue. “It seems that’s settled. I’ve lost a fine soldier, thank you very much. I hope that settles all this talk of siding with that del Rio woman.”
“I’m not promising anything,” McMasters snarled as he turned on his heel. The crowd didn’t part for him; his own guards barely stepped out of his way as he shoved and pushed his way out of the hotel.
Feeney turned to Mary, who’d worn a look of deep suspicion through the whole thing, and said loudly, “I for one could use a drink. Who’s with me?”
FREE AGENT
“Get out,” Takata said when the Miner walked into his bar again. They’d had a nice long quiet afternoon of everyone nursing their wounds and then she’d walked right across the galleria like she owned the place, and stood in his doorway with her arms crossed. He swept the floor in a long pink shop apron that went to his shins, glowering.
“I thought you wanted me to quit Feeney’s service.”
“I do!” He stopped and leaned the broom against a table. “You did?”
“Paid him back in full.” The ten thousand, at least. What was left of the rest, she figured was hers.
His face lit up. “Well. Well! I’ll be damned. You listened to me? Nobody ever listens to me. Well!”
“I don’t listen to you either,” offered Herrera from his usual corner.
Takata ignored him, instead gathering up his shop apron with both hands and practically dancing his way back behind the bar. He beckoned the Miner with one hand as he fiddled with the taps using the other, and then pulled a tall glass of amber beer. The long slow pour headed up and foamed over into the overflow. “So when are you heading out?”
“I’m staying put,” she said, and he smoothly pulled back the hand that had been in the process of offering the cold inviting drink.
“Why?” His suspicion was palpable, and he held the glass up against his apron.
She shrugged again. “I’m still pretty broke.”
“What, and you think he’ll take you back?”
“Or Angelica.”
“Oh.” He held eye contact as he took a long drink from the glass in his hand, and then set it on the bar behind the taps, well out of her arm’s reach. “So that’s it.”
“You gonna get back to croaking all those flea-ridden pus-bags?” called Herrera from his corner.
She sat on a stool and shrugged. “Nobody’s paying me for anything right now,” she said.
“Yeah, but you expect that to change,” Takata said sourly. He took his apron off and shoved it under the counter.
“It might. It might not.”
“I’m cheering for ‘might not’.”
“Seems to me,” the Miner said, “that hurrying things along is the better way to go.”
Takata was shaking his head emphatically before she’d finished talking. “No, no, no. You sound like Herrera. The fighting won’t stop. They’ll keep importing goons. They’ll drag it out. Better to keep it at a simmer, so people come back again. All we need is a little peace, get some money coming in, everybody will calm down.”
“Bullshit!” Herrera jumped to his feet. “Horse shit! Rat shit, every kind of shit. That’s no kind of peace, that’s just a ceasefire. It’s a fake shitty peace.”
“I’ll take a ceasefire any damn day of the week!” Takata’s face went red and he jabbed a finger at Herrera. “I take too much of your holier-than-thou ‘no justice no peace’ garbage. You don’t have rent to pay, you just have your pride to worry about.”
“What about your pride, hey? Don’t you have any of that under your pretty pink apron? You want to go back to paying protection money? You want to have Nuke and Raj and them back in here every night stealing your booze and laughing at you? That what you want? There a profit in that?”
“Shut up, Herrera, you don’t know.”
“I do know! I watched everybody get driven out of this station, my station, everybody I was supposed to be protecting. Where’s Cheyenne? Where’s Qi? Where’s Binyamin and Sven and Arun and Precious? Huh?”
“Arun’s still here,” Takata said, petulant.
“Hiding out in the lower decks! Everyone else got driven off. You’re too stubborn to leave, or you signed a shitty lease, or you like the smell too much, I don’t know, but don’t pretend this all goes back to normal if Feeney and Angelica kiss and make up. Them and McMasters are a goddamn pus-filled boil, and it’s not going to get better on its own. Someone’s got to squeeze it.” He held his hand up and squeezed three fingers together in front of his contorted expression.
“What, you think that’s her? She’s your royal pus-squeezer, is she?”
They both stopped and looked at her, suddenly embarrassed.
“Pus squeezer,” she deadpanned.
“Eh,” Takata said, rubbing the back of his head with one hand. “Forget him, he’s drunk.”
“I’m not drunk enough for this,” Herrera vowed and weaved toward the front door. Then he turned to the Miner. “You stay here tonight. He’s got a mattress for drunks, not too full of bugs.”
“She’s not staying here, she’s broke!”
“I’m paying!” He wheeled and overdid it, grasping at a chair to steady himself. “I’m paying. And I’m going to bed now, so go get it and I’ll pay.”
Takata favored them both with a scowl, then threw his hands up and went into the back. Herrera watched him go, then leaned over to the Miner, his sour whiskey breath strong as a punch in the face. “He’s not going to lose this place,” he said, staring intently at her like only a drunk can. “I paid the rent, and I’m going to pay it. He needs to remember his goddamn pride, that’s what he needs. He needs to remember what it was like to run a good restaurant for real, not a dive bar for gangsters, not a watering hole for broken down old assholes like me. You kill those motherfuckers. You kill them dead. Worth your while.”
He slapped her on the shoulder, nodded more to himself than to her, then staggered out the front door. The galleria lights were down for the night, and he weaved out into the darkness among the tables and potted trees, and she watched him go.
“Sentimental old buzzard,” Takata groused behind her. He struggled with a thick slab of yellowed foam, hauling it this way and that to free it from the doorway. “All this crap has really hurt him. This used to be a nice station, and he used to do a good job. But he’s too wrapped up in the injustice of it all. The perfect’s the enemy of the good. Once the fighting dies down and people come back, he’ll perk up. People don’t care if there’s criminals, they only care if there’s crime, if they’ll get hurt or get robbed. Once it seems calm, it’ll be calm, and he’ll be all right. He put up with worse and it was all right.” He threw the slab of foam out next to the bar, then punched the button to lower the shutters. They creaked and rattled and shut out the remaining light from the galleria.
“Restroom’s over there. Don’t use too much water, will you? I don’t meter it, and he’s got no business paying for you. He’s too free with his cash, he feels too guilty about it.” He paused. “What do I call you, anyway?”
“Jane works.”
“That your name?”
She shrugged. “Could be. Forgot my name.”
He snorted a laugh. “Sure.” Then he looked down at the deck, thoughtful. “Guy named Zhuang Zhou once said that the point of a fish net was to catch a fish. When you catch it, you forget the net. Or whatever you catch fish with, I don’t know. And a rabbit trap. Catch the rabbit, forget the trap. And the point of words, he said, the point of words was to catch meaning, so what he wanted was to talk to the guy who forgot words, because that’s the guy who really understood stuff. So, I just wonder, what would he make of someone who forgot their own name.”
“Don’t know. Forgot that, too.”
They stood a while in the low light, him staring at the deck, her watching him.
“Good night,” she said. He looked up at her, surprised, then nodded sharply in reply and went in back.
The lights dimmed on their own, leaving her in the dark with only a few red status lights scattered around the place like sparse constellations. The low rumble of the air movers and the subtle rush of water and coolant, noises that had always been there, suddenly intruded on her senses. All the sounds of an operational space station, just as she’d expect to hear them on any other station. She unstrapped her sword and lay it on the floor. She’d laid low after the fight, walking the abandoned middle decks and thinking. She hadn’t gone back to her ship; didn’t want to draw attention to it. The walking had tired her out, at least. She settled into the faint boozy-sour smell of the foam mattress for another sleepless night, for her brain’s usual recitation of decades’ worth of wrongs and lost friends, and she fell fast asleep.
DITZ AND SCREWBALL TAKE A STROLL
“She’s just sitting there,” Ditz said almost reverently. He was bent at the waist so that he could rest both arms and his chin on the railing, and because his hairy ass stuck out of his pants that way Screwball walked up to the railing so he didn’t have to look at it. Jane was still there in the galleria, sitting on a chair in front of the restaurant. She’d been there all morning, or at least since the crack of ten. She sat with both feet on the floor, with her sword across her lap, and she was reading a beat-up paperback book. It looked like she was halfway through already.
“McMasters came out before,” Ditz said, and yawned. He looked up and Screwball could see that his pupils were blown. “When there weren’t too many people watching. He kinda came up and huffed at her and said, ‘How much?’ and I think she said fifteen thousand–”
“What!” Screwball looked at him in astonishment.
“That’s what I thought she said. Anyway he got all pissed off and huffed and puffed and stomped around, and he said,” here Ditz used a high-pitched voice, “‘Get off my station!’ And she said – get this, man – she said, ‘Get out of my light.’ I thought that was pretty good, man. Get out of my light.”
Screwball looked down at her. She turned a page. Pairs of eyes all around the edge of the galleria were on her. Screwball could see faces in the casino windows and through the big heavy shutters on the security station. She turned another page.
He shook himself away and stood back from the railing. “The old man wants me to go scout around the old repair bay,” he said. “See what Sparks is up to, if I can.”
“Oh, all right,” Ditz said, and heaved himself up off the railing.
“I wasn’t– I mean.” Screwball stammered. “I was just saying. He wanted me to do it. I wasn’t asking you to come along.”
“It’s cool, we’re bros. You don’t have to ask.”
“Yeah, but.” Ditz walked past him, then turned and beckoned. Screwball slumped his shoulders and followed. They cut back through the hotel, and he kept his voice low.
“I was just saying, it was cool that he asked me, you know. He like knows my name and shit now.”
“And you want your old pal to help out, it’s cool.”
“No,” he protested, but it fell on deaf ears, or at least stoned ones. �
��Whatever.”
“Me and Sparks go way back,” Ditz said as they walked. “She’s wicked smart, but kinda high-strung, you know?”
“I don’t know who she is.”
“Oh! Huh. She, like, runs the repair bay.”
“Yeah, I figured that much out.”
“Right. She’s a mechanic.” Screwball made impatient noises. “Oh, and she used to run all the old man’s ‘salvage’ operations.” Ditz used his fingers to make quote marks in the air, and stumbled after distracting himself from his walking. “It’s a chop shop, see? Pull in wrecked ships that maybe were wrecked on purpose sometimes, scavenge for stuff to sell, and scrap the rest. Used to make good money, I guess. Only she went with Angelica because she was kind of sweet on Raj.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, and took the stairs down.
“I got the feeling,” Screwball offered, “that he thinks she’s up to something.”
“Who?”
“Sparks.”
“Sparks is a she, dude.”
“Feeney. Feeney thinks that Sparks Laghari is up to something.”
“Oh. Probably right. She’s wicked smart.”
“Why are we going this way? This isn’t the way the old man said to go.”
Ditz turned and winked. “This is the back way. When me and her used to smoke up I’d come out this way. There’s an office one deck up. She doesn’t use it much, and it’s locked but I know the code… woah.”
He clumsily put an arm up in front of Screwball, and they both fell silent. Up ahead and around a corner, Screwball heard raucous laughter and someone swearing a blue streak. He flattened himself against the white plastic bulkhead, felt the deep bass thrum of air flowing through the big conduits overhead.
“Let’s go around the other way,” Screwball murmured.
“Can’t,” Ditz said. “That’s where we’re going.”
“That’s Sparks’s office up ahead?”
“Yeah. Been there a bunch of times, man. Know it like the back of my hand.”
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