“He’ll assume it’s Jane,” Feeney said, and a big grin spread across his face. “That’s exactly what he’ll do.” He clapped his hands in delight. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well, um,” he said. He cast about the corners of his brain, which had suddenly gone stubbornly blank. He gaped, and then admitted. “Well, I hadn’t gotten that far.”
Feeney’s grin didn’t fade, though Screwball didn’t like the skeptical look on Mary’s face. “Well, I didn’t hire you to be the brains of the outfit, so that’s all right. But you’re on the right track, by God, you’re on the right track.”
“There’s something else weird,” Screwball found himself saying before his brain started screaming and throwing on the brakes. “Ditz kind of, um, shot some dudes.”
Mary stared at him. “Kind of. Shot. Some dudes.”
“Yeah, but like, by accident.”
“He accidentally had a gun. And accidentally shot some dudes. Goddamnit.”
“But, like, it’s OK? That was yesterday, and Angelica hasn’t said shit. She has to know. So why hasn’t McMasters come and yelled at us?”
All three fell silent, and Screwball tried to look thoughtful instead of just confused. Feeney looked up first, still grinning.
“Well isn’t that interesting. Pour yourself a drink, my boy, and let’s put our thinking caps on.”
RAJ AND THE MINER VISIT SPARKS
The Miner was still considering her next move when the knock came on the door. After pointing out that she wasn’t terribly popular, Angelica had given the Miner one of the private karaoke suites to sleep in, evicting the surly-looking fighter who’d previously had that honor. The door locked, anyway, though the Miner had taken the precaution of reprogramming it. She’d half-woken six or seven times the previous night to noises outside the restaurant or the air movers momentarily falling silent, and it was starting to catch up to her. Light sleep was still better than no sleep, of course, and she hadn’t had to resort to Doc Mills’s sleeping meds yet, but an early bedtime was an attractive option.
Raj del Rio filled the doorway when it opened, grinning. Those eye teeth mods made him look like a wolf when he did that, and the Miner had no doubt that he grinned like that as often as he could, for exactly that reason. He had the white fez on still, though it clashed with the night’s outfit of black semi-shined jacket and trousers. “Good, you’re still up. Come on, and be quiet. I want to show you something.”
They crept out the back of the casino past snoring hulks on the floor. There was a guard station at the back, but Raj explained that he’d told them to grab some dinner. On cue, the Miner’s stomach grumbled. Raj laughed and handed her a half-eaten ration bar.
“It’s supposed to taste like figs,” he said, “but I don’t know what the fuck a fig is, so who knows.”
The Miner didn’t exactly know what a fig was either, just some kind of fruit, but the cloyingly sweet bar tasted fine. It turned to a thick paste in her mouth with the faintest hint of mold. She’d had far worse; still, she took only a few bites before folding the silver wrapper over and handing it back. She ignored the university shield emblem stamped on it.
“They make you shit bricks,” Raj said conversationally as he tucked the rest back into his inside jacket pocket. “But I think they taste all right.”
“That they do,” the Miner agreed. “What did you want to show me?”
“A little ways on.” He glanced at her. “Relax, if I wanted to kill you I’d have killed you.”
“You’d have tried.”
He laughed. “I like you, sister.”
They talked companionably as they walked, and the Miner found herself forgetting very easily her resolve to kill him. He brought up her sword, and spoke knowledgeably on the subject of metal composition and whether annealing-based repairs were worth a damn. They both agreed not. That brought the topic to killing, a subject on which he spoke equally knowledgeably, and with similar diffidence.
“This whole war is bullshit,” he said. “Feeney’s all right, I like him. Get some booze in him and he’s a real droog. The whole thing with Willy sucked, but it wasn’t really his fault. It’s just, trying to be a boss and a grandfather both, that’s hard.”
“Willy?”
“Nuke, I mean. I never got used to calling him that.”
“How’d it suck?”
“We were friends. He was a great guy. Little psycho, sure, but this line of work, come on. No worse than Ditz or Monkey.” He chuckled. “Maybe no worse than me, hey, sister?”
She just chuckled. They walked in silence a short ways.
“What happened to Nuke, anyway?”
Raj surprised her by sighing theatrically. “I. Don’t. Know. All right, that out of the way? You can tell my dear sister that you tried, but I still don’t know, and she can fuck off all right?”
The Miner gave him a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?”
“Angelica. She told you to ask that.”
The Miner shook her head. “Nope. Just curious is all. Honest.”
“Oh.” He looked mollified by that. “Sorry, I’m tired of her trying to worm it out of me, but shit, I really don’t know what the old man did with the guy.”
“Think he killed him?”
Raj gave her a morose look, serious. “If he has any smarts he did.”
“I thought you liked Nuke.”
“I did. I like the old man, too. But you stab someone in the back like that, you better make sure he’s dead. That’s all I’m saying.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, so the Miner kept her mouth shut. After a few steps, Raj went on.
“It was his fight with that shitfuck trucker that did it, not just the–” he waved his hand vaguely at his chest. “He started fights once he got that thing in. He said he was playing on God mode now, nobody could hurt him, nobody could let him be hurt. Word got around, mostly, people stayed out of his way. So he started ambushing people, starting shit out of the blue.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. I never seen my sister that scared. It was one thing when he picked fights with people who knew what that thing in his chest was. But one dumbshit trucker coulda killed us all and never had a clue. You know what happens if you set one of those things off inside a space station, even a tiny one like that?”
“Instant death for anyone standing close by. Radiation burns for anyone not behind a few inches of solid metal or rock. An expanding fireball that burns through plastic and thin metal. An electromagnetic pulse that knocks out unshielded electronics, including emergency systems. A pressure wave that travels the length of the station’s air mover network, blowing out baffles and control surfaces. If you’re lucky, the whole thing shuts down. If you’re unlucky, it helpfully spreads radioactive particles throughout the entire inhabited space.”
“…yeah,” Raj said weakly after her matter-of-fact recitation. “Something like that.”
They walked a long way in silence. Raj knew his way through the stained white plastic corridors, down stairwells. The Miner stopped at each landing and listened before they proceeded. Raj smiled indulgently the first two times, then grinned the third time she did it.
“You give them way too much credit,” he said. “Anyway, this is our side of the station. Feeney’s guys wouldn’t come over here.”
“You don’t patrol it. You don’t have enough people to claim this much territory.”
He cocked his head at her. “How many you think we need?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know how much you claim. You should be tagging the walls so your people know. You want to claim half the station? I’d want two hundred people before I’d call it mine. Or at least doubled-up surveillance and a good face rec AI to monitor the feeds, trained on every face that goes into Feeney’s hotel.”
“Like yours?” The Miner didn’t turn to look at him, but heard the grin in his voice.
“If I were you, I’d keep tabs on where I was.” She said it seriously.
“Eh. You’re probably right. You seem to know your shit. The thing is, the territory’s ours because everyone kind of agrees it’s ours. Sis hates Feeney like a bleeding hemorrhoid but she doesn’t want to piss off McMasters, and she still thinks Mr Shine might come around.”
“Tell me about Mr Shine.”
He shrugged expressively. “Big guy. Used to run the casino, but got huffy when Sis and Feeney started fighting. He threw in with Angelica when she said Nuke had to go, but then when Nuke did go he didn’t want to knock Feeney off.”
“So why doesn’t he still work for Feeney?”
“Because the old man ordered him to kill Angelica, and he said fuck that, grow up.” He turned, wide-eyed. “Literally, he told the old man to grow up. He’s like, shit, half Feeney’s age. So the old man blew his top, and Mr Shine got mad and said some shit, and he kind of banished himself down to the bottom decks, down in the rock. A bunch of our better people went with him, the people who used to actually run stuff and only got rough on the side, you know? Dealers and dishwashers and shit. Never fuck with a dishwasher, lady. Most of the crews up in the hotel and the casino are new, pretty much anyone we could hire off the ships that come through.”
The Miner considered that, and wondered how Raj knew what passed between Feeney and Shine. “They suck.”
“Yeah, I know they suck. But they all suck kind of the same, so it evens out.” He favored her with another grin that was more like a leer. The white fez teetered ominously as he swung his head. “Raj del Rio’s Grand Theory of Mutual Sucking. Think there’s a Nobel Prize in it?”
“No.”
He just laughed. “So how would you beat Feeney, with this little crew of misfits and assholes?”
She mulled it over, skipped the real answer, and replied, “Throw morons at them until they turtle in the hotel. Blow the seals so the station systems go on segment lockdown. Punch a hole in the hull over Feeney’s office and vent atmo until the breach plugs with corpses.” She shrugged.
Raj whistled. “Shit, sister, that’s cold.”
“Cold works.”
Instead of responding, he said, “We’re almost there.”
“Where’s there?”
“You’ll see.”
They’d been walking for at least ten minutes, but the Miner had a poor sense of direction in the twisting corridors of the lower station, and her map was incomplete. They were on deck six, same as the drug lab, but that was all she knew. She toyed with the idea of killing Raj, but decided against it – someone would notice they left at the same time, and anyway they’d never find the body, which would defeat the purpose.
“Here we are,” Raj said, interrupting her homicidal musings. The sign had been removed from above the hatchway, but the open hatch showed plainly where they were: one of the mechanics’ bays, where the old military station would have performed ship repairs that needed dry dock. Off to both sides where they couldn’t be seen from the hallway, three bored-looking goons loitered. “After you,” he added.
The Miner hesitated at his too-broad grin, but shrugged and took a step. The ground seemed to shift away from underneath her foot, and she stumbled – but didn’t fall. Her momentum carried her forward, but she managed to turn and see Raj laughing. He was bending over into the inside bulkhead and grabbing a pair of magnet shoes stuck to the post next to the hatch they’d come through, so that he could walk in the nullified gravity. She cursed herself for not putting two and two together, and had plenty of opportunity to do it while she slowly drifted until she bumped into a stack of something covered in a tarp and strapped down to the deck.
She bounced gently off it, and wheeled in the air. She could fight like that if she had to – had done it, ages ago, and won – and she saw no reason to either panic or look like she was panicking. Instead she just let herself drift and turn. The bay loomed, cavernous and dark, full of stuck-down containers and a big white ship whose hull had already been partly stripped. Spotlights lit the areas where the hull sections met empty air, where someone had begun breaking down the ship into salable parts. The bits where the ship’s name would have been painted on had all been, by some coincidence, already removed despite being at multiple corners of the huge form.
“Who the hell are you?” A sharp voice came from above her.
“She’s with me, Sparks!”
From above the Miner, the only other sound was the hiss of air jets. Something gently pushed her toward the floor. When she turned in her drifting, she looked up to see a chair assembly rotating in her field of view. Tools and parts clung to it by tethers like a hairball, and in the center of the metal cyclone sat ensconced a thin gray-haired woman with an acid expression and no legs. A screwdriver and a socket wrench were both stuck to the side of her head – implanted magnets? She’d just met Sparks Laghari, was the Miner’s guess.
“Why’s she with you? You ever heard of OPSEC, idiot?”
The Miner, who had managed to stop her drift and steady herself against a container, looked up.
Raj had strolled over to the Miner with another pair of slip-on magnet shoes, and she looked around absentmindedly as she cinched them on over her boots. The dry dock loomed overhead, where steel arches braced painted asteroidal rock and formed a hangar shape with individually-controlled spotlights lighting up the partially-consumed hulk floating in the center of the space. Little robots darted around on air jets, starting and stopping abruptly like insects. Some flew solo, others hauled chunks of metal and machinery in pairs or triplets.
The Miner couldn’t tell much about the ship in mid-disassembly – she could do basic repairs on her own ship without manual vids or overlays, and she was proud of that, but she wasn’t a general mechanic, let alone a shipwright. The ship was a Cavalier-class, pretty new, or at least not used much, since its plating didn’t have the mismatched-shade look from the replacement of used-up ablative panels, nor many scars from micrometeorite or charged particle strikes. The pilot’s nest had probably been up front, but that was the section that had been most thoroughly disassembled. Interior consoles showed through the rectangular holes in the hull, and gold foil gleamed in pockets where sensitive instruments still lay nestled in bundles of cabling.
The equipment around the hangar looked like scaled-up versions of the stuff she kept around her own ship: welders and cutters sat coiled with their air filters and harnesses waving gently in the low-G breeze, flower-like clamps stuck to the wall where their arms could be extended and fixed where needed, vacuum hoses curled like vine tendrils into the spaces where they’d been last used. Loose hand tools swayed on their tethers like seaweed. Somewhere out of sight, she could hear the sizzle and crackle of a laser cutter at work on metal, and the breeze of the heavy-duty air recyclers tickled the hairs on her forearms and neck.
Sparks studied her as she looked around the space. “Nice,” the Miner finally said, straightening up as her feet clicked gently to the deck, and turning her attention to the mechanic. Sparks sat nestled in a heavily-customized mover chair, her left hand lazily manipulating the major thrusters to keep her moving in a slow orbit around her guests. The mechanic herself was a lean woman with a hatchet face. The sleeves of her jumpsuit had been cut off to show well-muscled arms. Her welding goggles were pushed up into a rat’s nest of gray hair that floated free in tangles and curls. Her legs looked to be cut off mid-thigh, with the ends nestled up against a welded-on backstop.
Instruments the Miner couldn’t identify bristled on and in the floating chair, with tiny lights blinking and flickering in a rainbow of colors, little jets adjusting her orientation and position with squirts of cold air that she could feel from a few meters away. Tiny antennas and manipulators stuck out at odd angles.
“This is Jane,” Raj said. “She’s a bit of a badass. You heard of her?”
Sparks craned her head this way and that, frowned at the sword. “Thought she worked for Feeney.”
“Not anymore.”
“Not exactly the trustworthy type, then.”
“We both used to work for Feeney too, Sparks.”
She grunted. “That’s different. Why’d you switch sides?”
The Miner shrugged. “Started a fight in the galleria. He fired me to save face with McMasters. I figured that made me a free agent.”
She stuck her hands in her pockets and looked at Sparks with a bland expression. She still had two listening bugs left. Shitty range and not much power left, but maybe worth dropping.
“So why’d you join up with us? Like to gamble?”
The Miner tilted her head to one side, but Raj answered for her.
“She liked my hat.”
Sparks gave him a hard look, then scowled. “You fucking idiot. I should have told you to leave it.”
“You should have tried, anyway.” He grinned like that was a friendly thing to say.
She grumbled something under her breath. “So what do you want?”
“I wanted to see how done you were, and I wanted our new friend to have a look at our security down here if it’s going to be a while. Since she already knew what we had here, I figured it wasn’t a risk.”
She swore. “It’s a big fucking ship, and you want it stripped instead of pulped. It’s going to take ages before we make any money off it.” She squinted. “That’s what you wanted her to hear, right?”
He just laughed. “How about the data? Anything we can sell right away?”
The Miner took an experimental step in the magnet shoes, pretending to be unused to them, and finding that she actually kind of was. The hand she put out to steady herself against the bulk under the tarp left behind one of the bugs in the cloth’s folds. It looked enough like junk that it wouldn’t stand out too much if anyone found it, she hoped.
Sparks shook her head. “Not my thing.”
The Miner pointed off at some storage cubes strapped down near the enormous outer hatch. “I can buy some of that fuel off you.”
“You bloody well can’t. Do I look like a fucking dockmaster?” She sneered and turned back to Raj. “I sent everything I recovered that I can’t use myself to Angelica. Bank links for most of the crew, but you’d be a fucking idiot to tap those.”
Red Noise Page 19