CHANGE OF PLANS
The Miner ate her breakfast, and it tasted better for having paid for it. It wasn’t rice exactly, and it wasn’t coffee exactly, but the delicately salted leftover tilapia from the belowdecks aquaculture tasted at that moment like the best thing she’d ever had.
Takata stared at his little video screen for a while after breakfast, sitting behind the bar and not bothering to make conversation. The Miner, with his grunted permission, went to borrow another of his dozen ratty paperbacks, and noted with amusement that The Count of Monte Cristo had disappeared. From the remainder, she finally selected The Moonstone and settled into a booth to read it while Takata, his video ended, shuffled back to bed for a nap.
The Miner read in the quiet of the dark restaurant through the morning, sitting in a booth with one foot propped up on the seat. She could hear Takata’s gentle snoring through the curtain. It had been long enough to put the sides on edge, she decided; it was time to make her move and get Mr Shine to step up. She put down the book and contacted her ship.
“Hi boss!”
“Report status.”
The ship rattled through a long list of numbers: fuel level, gas mixtures, power generation, battery levels, water purity, and on and on. Everything sounded good. Incident report showed eighteen intrusion attempts, no successful logins. McMasters, she figured. If he really wanted to get in and was willing to have it officially traced to his office, then she couldn’t stop him, but he seemed to want to keep it quiet. Could be he realized she’d be an unfortunate enemy. Could be he just didn’t see the profit in it yet. Could be he didn’t know how. She pulled up video from the plant room, and felt herself relax when it came up, as muscles she didn’t know were clenched untensed. The Phalaenopsis was starting to droop, but it would be all right for a few more days. The bonsai were in good shape; only a few dropped leaves that she ached to sweep away. She gazed at it awhile in soft focus, until she felt she could almost smell the earthy aroma of the small room.
“I should go,” she murmured. To hell with Feeney and Angelica and McMasters. To hell with Shine. Maybe Takata was right, maybe it would be better for one of them to just win. Let the lures of peace and prosperity tame them. Maybe justice would come in time, maybe not. The moral arc of the universe was a sine wave, wasn’t it?
She woke from her reverie to banging from the kitchen. Takata, with her help, had figured out how Angelica had overridden the lock, and fixed it so that wouldn’t work. Definitely a fist on metal. She considered going to open it, and decided not to. Wasn’t in her plan, maybe, or just not up for it yet.
Takata came out of his bedroom looking rumpled and grumpy. “It’s for you,” he said sourly.
“I’m not at home.”
He leveled a dull glare at her, then reached over and punched the button to raise the shutters.
“Well I am,” he said as they rattled and squealed open. “So figure out for yourself what you’re doing.”
The shutters lifted to show someone’s crossed black-clad legs in a chair out front. A pair of hands had just finished putting something away, and the body rose to its feet. Folded arms reappeared over a black jacket, but not a security uniform. A smirking handsome face with deftly-done iridescent scales at the temples of a hairless scalp. The Miner had seen that face before, and abruptly had the familiar thought that he looked too cheerful to be a local.
The Miner stiffened as the shutters opened all the way to show atop the man’s bald head a familiar white fez with a golden tassel, specked with red that hadn’t been there when she’d first seen the man, talking to the previous owner of the hat. She glanced at Takata, and the crumpled, miserable look on his face confirmed that he recognized it too.
“Angelica’s brother,” Takata muttered. His fingers clawed at the bar. “God damn it,” he muttered, his voice choked. “I told them to keep their mouths shut.”
The new owner of the fez bowed elaborately, though not so low that it fell off. Two thugs the Miner recognized as Feeney’s goons rushed up, but four more appeared from the sides to intercept them. The young man paid them no mind.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I get back from a business trip, and all I hear is about this crazy talented fighter who came to town.”
The Miner nodded.
“My name is Raj del Rio.”
“That so?”
He waited, then just smiled. “My sister made you an offer yesterday. I was hoping I could persuade you to take it.”
She raised an eyebrow. “She offered me less than Feeney did. Why would I take it?”
The smile widened to a grin, accompanied by a knowing wink. “She just expected to have to bargain, you understand these things. If she hadn’t been so rudely interrupted, she might have gone up to, who knows? Twelve thousand credits?”
“Might have. Maybe higher.”
He looked delighted, and she saw that his canine teeth were artificially lengthened. Implants or gene mods, she wondered, and decided she didn’t know enough about dentistry.
“Fourteen? Ah no, obviously sixteen thousand.”
“She’d go that high, would she?”
“I’m confident.”
“She must be crazy. Or desperate.”
His expression froze very briefly, and he seemed to decide that it was a joke. “Could be, I hear craziness is genetic. Wouldn’t you work for a crazy woman for sixteen thousand credits, though?”
She scratched her neck under the collar of her jumpsuit and gave him a searching look. “Might have done, yesterday,” she admitted. “But you shouldn’t have worn that hat, Raj del Rio.”
The grin became brittle, and behind her Takata made a small noise of triumph. “Why not? I think it’s pretty cunning, don’t you?”
“It looks good on you. Striking.”
“Well, then!” He showed more of his teeth and got a sly look. “Maybe you want more than money? I’m a good looking son of a bitch, I know, but let’s stick to business, hey?”
“The trouble is, Raj, I know where you got that hat.”
The grin went away entirely. “You think you do.”
“I know where you got it. And I know it means you just came into a lot of money. I aim to have some of that money. Let’s say, twenty-five thousand credits of it.”
Raj threw back his head and laughed raucously, his clapping drowning out the noises of betrayal behind her. She stepped away from the bar before Takata could find the shotgun secreted there. “I’m glad we understand each other,” she said, and left The Moonstone where it lay.
WORKING FOR ANGELICA
Two dozen pairs of wary eyes followed the Miner as Raj led her into the casino. They might have seen her stagger at the wave of humid, body odor-laced air released when the doors slid open for her, an earthiness that reminded her very faintly of her plant room. Maybe she imagined it, but those eyes seemed hungrier, less drug-dulled than Feeney’s crew. Rows of one-armed bandits, betting games, and pachinko machines filled the casino’s front room, dark and quiet and dead-looking, standing guard in their rows over blankets, bottles, garbage, and other flotsam of human nesting. Angelica’s soldiers stood silently, watching the two of them walk slowly down the center aisle.
Angelica made her entrance down from the top of the sweeping blue-lit spiral staircase, and it would have been impressive had the Miner not noticed her shadow hovering on the top step waiting for her cue. She stepped slowly until she arrived halfway down the stairs, where her feet were level with the Miner’s face, and stood silent a moment. All the noise was breathing and the low rumble of ineffective air movers. The stale humid air felt like it could drown her. If she hadn’t been choking on the smells of unwashed goons and cheap booze, the Miner might even have felt slightly intimidated.
“You have much to answer for,” Angelica said coldly.
The Miner scratched behind her left ear. “That so?”
“You’ve killed four of my crew.”
“Four?” The Miner
frowned, and silently counted on her fingers: thumb, first finger, middle finger. She hesitated, wagged her head a little as though mentally arguing a point, and relaxed the other two on the hand. “Could be. So what?”
She heard Raj suppress a snicker.
“So,” Angelica continued. “If you kill four of mine, I expect you to kill four times four of his!” Her voice rose, and she had good control of it. Hard faces all around the Miner nodded, tight-lipped and serious game faces ready for battle. The few she recognized seemed the angriest.
“That’s it? Kill fifteen people? All right.”
Angelica’s face froze, righteous anger petrified. The Miner waited. A few of the hard faces looked suddenly worried; eyebrows furrowed, eyes cast to the side in calculation. Raj did laugh then, and slapped her on the back.
“You’ll fit right in,” he said as he walked around her with a big grin on his face, then spread his hands to take in the rest of the room. “You and all us other intellectuals.”
His laugh spread among the crowd, uneasily at first, and then more naturally. A few faces still stared angrily at her, but most of Angelica’s crew had relaxed. Angelica herself looked to have lost some poise. She stared down past her brother at the Miner, then nodded to herself and smiled. It was a more natural expression for her, tired and amused at the same time. In another life, the Miner thought she might have liked this woman.
“Come up to my office,” Angelica said. “We’ve got some plans to make.”
The Miner hesitated, then followed. The few pairs of eyes still on her glared as she ascended the stairs. She caught a breeze from the upstairs office, cooler, drier, and not nearly as eye-watering. The office itself sat perched over the casino like a vulture. Two glass windows provided a view of the casino floor, but the rest of the round office’s walls were floor-to-ceiling video screens. A black kidney-shaped glass desk squatted in the middle of the space with a comfortable-but-imposing black leather chair nestled in the indentation.
“Much better up here,” Angelica said, giving her a significant look as the door slid shut behind them. The Miner paid her no attention, attracted instead by the walls covered in dimly-lit video and neon spikes of data graphs. She made an unconcerned tour of the room, peering at bits and pieces. Most of the views were of the casino floor – slot machine rows in front, poker and mahjong tables further back, then smaller private rooms whose tables and booths were covered with bedding, garbage, and weaponry. Some of the views showed the galleria, and plain white-plastic back passageways marked with black letters and numbers that meant nothing to her. The front of Feeney’s hotel featured prominently from multiple angles, and the galleria entrance to the security station. Part of a cargo hold showed in one view, with its neighboring squares blacked out. Deciding it would be more suspicious to skip those than to pay obvious attention to them, she dutifully scratched her chin at them for a moment before moving on. She made a show of taking it all in, not obviously focusing on any one of them. Either Angelica was intimately familiar with and interested in all those views, or they were tossed up in an effort to impress.
She turned her attention obliquely to her new employer, sitting erect in a big black chair meant for lounging. The Miner recognized it from pictures in the back of Feeney’s hotel wall, which had featured Mr Shine looking relaxed and genial in his tuxedo in that chair and Angelica herself leaning against the big black glass desk. Angelica in the flesh couldn’t quite look down her nose at the Miner from a seated position, but seemed to be trying her best. Probably get a neck cramp if she tried any harder.
The Miner finished her slow tour of the video wall, her hand resting on the round metal pommel of her sword like it was a swagger stick. She scratched her chin again, looked back at the feed of the security station. It looked wrong somehow, but she couldn’t work it out.
“I see a great deal of what goes on in this station,” Angelica said. “Very little gets past me.”
“I can recommend a good book.”
Angelica snorted.
“I suppose,” she continued when the Miner just kept staring at the video, “that you’d like to discuss money.”
The Miner looked directly at her, then. “Already discussed money.”
“You discussed it with my brother. Now you will discuss it with me.”
The Miner nodded. “I’ll take half up front.”
A thin eyebrow went up. “You’re taking a lot for granted, aren’t you?”
“Maybe. But I figure you don’t want me to walk out that door and tell your brother you don’t keep his deals. Especially if I’m loud about it.”
Angelica pursed her lips, then shrugged. “Before you do anything rash, let me show you something interesting.” With a finger movement, she made the video feeds vanish, and the Miner was suddenly looking up at herself. Grossly distorted, and from chest height, something about the scene looked familiar… aha.
“I can kill you,” came a flat, calm voice, hers. The speaker was on the desk, which she felt ruined the effect a bit. And she hated hearing the sound of her recorded voice anyway. “I’m not just some bruiser, kid. I’ve been trained, and you haven’t.”
They both watched as the Miner tried half-heartedly to defuse the situation, then cut down the kid with the lip rings. Then her scarred face got big on the wall, her fingers became huge, and the video cut.
Angelica looked at her like she expected a response, so the Miner said, “Damn, I’m good looking.”
“You’re a murderer.”
She shrugged. “You’re not paying me to organize your underwear.”
“No. But I think that not all compensation is in credits. Maybe some of yours is my not sending that video to Tom McMasters.”
The Miner let that hang in the air for a moment, and turned her back on Angelica in case she was too obviously smiling. “I suppose I could come down a bit in price.”
“I suppose you can. Feeney was paying you ten thousand, I’m told. I’ll match that.”
The Miner shook her head. “Come to that,” she said, “I don’t think you listened too carefully to what I was telling your brother about his hat.”
“What about his hat?” The Miner turned to see the genuine look of wariness.
“You don’t know where it came from, do you?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You should. It’s how I know about that ship in your cargo bay.” Angelica didn’t respond, so the Miner leaned in. “I’m pretty sure it’s how Feeney knows about it, too.”
Angelica’s thin, sour expression didn’t betray a lot of emotion. “He doesn’t know,” she said after a long think.
“All right, he doesn’t know,” the Miner said. She dropped into the chair across the desk from Angelica. “The son of a bitch hung me out to dry, so I’m not going to tell him, at least not for free.”
“You wouldn’t leave here alive.”
“Might.”
Angelica’s brown eyes didn’t blink, and didn’t show what she was thinking. The Miner tried not to look too aggressive, but didn’t look away either.
“Ten thousand up front,” Angelica finally said. “If you’re worth the rest, you’ll get the rest.”
“I’m worth it.”
“Then you’ll get it. I’m not Feeney, my word’s good.”
FEENEY PUTS ON HIS THINKING CAP
“Then why did you let her quit?”
Feeney just made a frustrated noise at his granddaughter. “I didn’t think she’d go work for that traitor! I thought she’d be sensible and lay low for a while, then come back to work for me. How was I to know she meant it?”
Mary leaned over the old man’s desk and almost growled at him. “All our people heard you letting her take the fall for that fight.”
“Well, you said yourself that it was her fault.”
“I did. It was.”
“So?” Feeney turned to Screwball with an appealing look, but he just shrugged. He felt weird and out of place hanging out with the boss, an
d he didn’t want to fuck it up by getting between family. He’d just sort of tagged along, and the old man had just sort of accepted that. So he shrugged, and that seemed to be the right answer.
“So,” Mary said, giving Screwball a momentary odd look, then back to her grandfather, “you didn’t have to accept it. You could have–”
“Could have!” Feeney slammed his veiny fist on the desktop. “I could have done this or I could have done that. I could have done a million things, but I always did what made sense to me, I always followed my instincts, and by God those instincts put me on top. If I second-guessed myself, I wouldn’t be here today.”
“Well,” Mary said, straightening up and standing back from the desk with her arms crossed. “Where you are today is in control of half a station, with a morale problem.”
“Are we? Corbell, do we have a morale problem?”
Both pairs of eyes were on Screwball, and he didn’t flee in terror.
“Well...” They did, that was the thing. Everyone came back from the fight pissed off that they’d have won it if Jane had been in it, and then there she was getting fired for it – nobody believed she “fell on her sword for the good of the side” for one minute – and now word was getting around that she’d gone to work for Angelica, and some people were bitching that they were all gonna die. “...kinda? Yeah?”
Feeney threw up his hands, but Screwball had a sudden maybe-not-stupid idea, and before he knew it his mouth was open again. “But I think that’s OK, right? They just need to win a little bit and they’ll feel pretty good that they’re still badasses even without her. And the security guy–”
“McMasters,” Mary supplied automatically, with a thoughtful look.
“McMasters, right, he’s not looking at us right now. He hates her for some reason and he thinks she’s a troublemaker, so maybe if we start something right now he’ll, um.” His brain caught up to his adrenaline and stumbled.
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