Air-filled compartments on the ship ruptured under their own pressure, and the great weakened hulk twisted and tore itself like a stunted butterfly struggling from a chrysalis. It would never go back in a repair bay in that shape. Impossible to hide. Impossible to profit from.
The Miner had her sword out fast when the hatch opened behind her. McMasters stood silhouetted against the bright corridor lights. He looked exhausted, beaten. Unarmed, though, and unsurprised to see her.
“The security cameras here still work,” he said. He sounded beaten, too. “Some of the only ones that do, that Angelica hasn’t pressganged into her piddly little information empire. Low-light sensitive. People used to come up here after-hours to screw. My predecessor amassed quite a collection.”
He left the hatch open, spilling a beam of yellow light onto the floor. He walked in and took a post at the observation bar on the edge of the darkness, letting the light beam separate them. The Miner sheathed her sword and half-turned so that she could see him and the wreckage at the same time.
“I looked you up, you know,” he said, staring at the ship as it contorted under explosive pressure, throwing off detritus that glimmered like stars. “I got a good picture and looked you up in the government’s facial recognition system. Do you know what came back?”
She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t bite.
“Nothing. Nothing came back, not a thing. So, being a good citizen, I uploaded it with a complete description of your criminal activities. Do you know how this official government system responded?”
She already had the eyebrow raised, and didn’t see any reason to change that fact.
“It said to say ‘hi’,” McMasters said. He turned with his hand still on the bar. “Hi.”
“Howdy,” she said, and it didn’t improve his mood.
“Who the hell are you?”
She shook her head. “Just another asteroid miner, that’s all. Got a past like anyone else. Maybe I abused my connections a little bit. Maybe you ought to think about what connections I might still have.”
Silence again. She felt a tremor in the bar, and under her feet. Her pulse quickened for a moment, and she wondered if a piece of the wreck had hit the station. McMasters looked down at a handheld screen, its green cast on his face in the dark painting him as a drowned sailor. He snapped it off suddenly, and in the afterglow his face appeared red.
“Explosion on deck six, northeast quadrant. I suppose you know what’s there.”
“Feeney’s little drug lab?”
“Feeney’s little drug lab. You wouldn’t know anything about that either, I suppose, Just Another Asteroid Miner?”
“Not surprised, anyway.”
“What’s your name?”
She shook her head.
“Are you working for Shinagawa? Shine? Is that what this is?”
Again, she shook her head.
McMasters gripped the bar and turned full on her, nostrils flared. “What the hell do you want from me?”
“I want you to do your job.”
“Job? What job? They dumped me in this hole between two bickering morons and told me to deal with it. Make it be quiet. There’s no job here, there’s only survival. And I’m doing that just fine.”
“You’re being a leech. A goddamn crooked leech. I told you every gravy train stops. This is the end of the line,” she said, waving her hand at the drifting wreck. “Get ships in here. Arrest Feeney and Angelica. When Mary and Raj take over their sides, tell them to clear out. No more profit here, party’s over. Give the people here a chance to get back on their feet. You do that and I’ll back you to the hilt, but if you don’t, then I’ll make damn sure you regret it.”
McMasters looked suddenly, briefly, very old and very tired. It turned into a snarl.
“You say I’m a leech,” he growled, his voice coarse with emotion. “Well I won’t argue with you, Miss High and Mighty. Better a leech than a louse, I say. You don’t care about this station, you don’t care about these people, you don’t care about anything. You’re vermin. Unwanted, unwelcome, flitting from station to station until someone notices you long enough to crush you like a bug.”
She felt her fingers tighten around the bar despite herself. “You’re not very good at this threatening thing.”
“I like it here, louse. I’ve got a good thing going, and I’ve got a right to be here, and if I’m a leech then by God, I’ve got my teeth in good, and it’s not over until I say it’s over.”
The reflected light off the wreck played on his face, twisted in bitter fury, droplets of sweat glistening in the fairy light, angry to the point of panting. She pursed her lips. “I think it’s the mustache. I hear you ranting, but I keep expecting you to ask my drinks order.”
“Who’s paying you? Shine? Herrera?”
“Go shave it off and threaten me again, I think it’ll work better.”
He slammed his fist down on the bar and obviously regretted it, but at least had the self-control to not too-obviously rub his hurt hand. “You think you’re funny?”
“Just passing the time while I wait for you to be serious.”
He stormed out, leaving her with a few hissed words, “You’re about to see how serious I can be.”
LONG TIME COMING
Space stations monitor wide fields around their positions. Dangers surround them on all sides. Their denizens picture rocks the size of ships in their nightmares, when really all it takes is a pebble the size of a fingertip, with enough speed, to punch a major hole in a hull. Even with modern self-repair technologies, that tends to ruin someone’s day. Junk lasers and ablative plating help, but only go so far.
Any station that wants to survive keeps LIDAR and camera arrays on a steady monitoring sweep backed by AIs, but again that goes only so far: those systems are expensive, and space stations are built and maintained by the lowest bidders. For every station, then, there’s a horizon beyond which no routine scanning is done. A ship, a yacht for example, orbiting just beyond that horizon, could escape detection for a very long time, particularly if John Feeney is paying people not to notice it.
Six months is a very long time to anyone waiting on that ship who is unaccustomed to solitude. A guy gets refused docking rights at three different stations, he starts to take it personal, starts to want to come home. Eventually the decent booze runs out, and the better drugs. Eventually a person has played every game, watched every movie and serial in both VR and flat, gotten bored with all the pornography. Eventually even the robot-delivered food and water becomes yet another reminder of how very badly a person has been betrayed by his friends and his kin.
Wilfred “Nuke” Feeney watched, spellbound, as a ship slowly and delicately exploded off the port side. He felt he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life. All tangerine orange and aneurysm red through the camera filters, struggling and writhing like a poisoned animal, throwing off sparks and debris for the lasers to burn up. He felt as though the universe was putting on a show for only him, finally sending him a sign. He watched a long time, idly scratching the hard blinking bulge in his chest, thinking. Thinking.
Wilfred “Nuke” Feeney had him an idea.
MIDNIGHT RENDEZVOUS
The Miner left the observation lounge when the wreck had drifted away from the nav lights, swallowed up by the dark. The geyser had stopped, and she figured the old emergency systems had finally staunched the bleeding of water and air. She wasn’t going to simply suffocate, then. Time to go. Time to tend her own garden, literally and figuratively.
The route back to her ship had to go around or through the galleria, unless she felt like putting the pressure suit back on for a two-hour spacewalk. All told, she figured she’d see less resistance going through Angelica’s territory than Feeney’s, and plotted her course that way.
The sounds of fighting grew as she walked. Gunshots, screaming. The lid had come off. This was just the first release of pressure, she knew. They’d retreat to their lairs, both sides wounde
d but not mortally, not yet. There could be no peace after this, though. They’d grind each other down until the law finally came, if not for them, then for that ship and its murdered crew.
It was already dying down as she walked the back passages. The shots grew louder but fewer. If Takata hadn’t gotten her message to bunker down, hadn’t passed it on, there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
“There you are! Just the woman. Come on, damn you, I need you.”
Raj appeared in front of her, pistol out and panting from running. He’d lost the fez. He pointed to her and grinned.
The Miner looked on the charming murderous bastard with a mixture of anger and pity. She wondered if it was worth killing him. There was no doubt he’d be good with that gun, but she was pretty damn good with a sword, and had her diamond skin on. She shook her head. “I’m done. I paid your sister back.”
“Fuck my sister, I need you.”
She stopped, intrigued despite herself. “For what?”
“Plan B. You’ll hate it. Come on!”
He ran, expecting her to follow, and for some reason she did.
They didn’t go far, down two decks by the stairs. Raj ran like a man possessed, heedless of the patches of fighting except that he must have had some idea where they were because the two of them didn’t see any of what she heard.
“Slow down,” she said, “I don’t want to run into a trap.”
“Don’t worry! We’re almost there.”
“Where’s ‘there’?” the Miner asked, and wasn’t surprised to not receive an answer.
They rounded a corner and came on a storefront. “Anita Nurse, Apothecary” read the friendly blue sign over windows covered over with yellow plastic sheeting. Raj stopped with a loud sigh, and bent over with his hands on his knees. A grim-faced young man in a motley assortment of armor stepped smartly out of the storefront’s door. The Miner recognized him, and realized only a moment too late that they were on opposite sides as Screwball stepped back and drew on her, eyes wide and panicked behind the handgun. He yelled at her to freeze, and she obliged.
She let her hands go out at her sides, eyeing him warily. He had a good ten centimeters on her, and had added decent armor to his outfit since she’d last seen him, even if looked like it had been scavenged from a half-dozen suits and styles. The black jumpsuit underneath was probably cut-resistant fabric, and the green-gray and black armor pieces looked like a jumble of mechanic’s protection and standard military ablative. He also looked exhausted to the point of haunted. She could take him apart if she could get close, but it still wouldn’t be easy. That panic in his eyes was a double-edged sword. He couldn’t cover Raj and her both, but there was no telling what he’d do when del Rio caught his breath and made a move. She made use of his distracted attention between the two of them to slowly get her hands in a position where she could draw and dash. Get him off-kilter, rely on her implants to close in fast for the kill.
Mary appeared in the door behind him, bloodied and worried-looking. She saw the Miner and tensed, her hands on the throwing knives at her belt. The Miner swore to herself, but Mary looked instead at Raj, and ran for him. Screwball stepped to the side, and didn’t fire. The Miner shifted her weight for the sprint, waiting for Mary to knife Raj as her distraction. Raj heaved himself upright just as the knife fighter reached him, and they kissed.
NICE DAY FOR IT
The Miner prided herself on being hard to faze, but the previous ten minutes had tested that sorely. She and the other guy, who reintroduced himself as Corbell, had ended their standoff in mutual befuddlement as Raj and Mary pawed each other in the middle of the corridor. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see Doc Mills show up in the doorway next, looking worried and impatient. He and the Miner made eye contact, but he didn’t say anything to her, only cleared his throat at the pair of criminal scions. They disentangled themselves from each other, and entered the pharmacy. The Miner and Corbell shrugged and obeyed Mary’s throaty “Come on, you assholes.”
It went fast. The five of them ducked into the dark, wrecked shop, into a clearing in the middle of the knocked-over shelves. The Miner figured a pharmacist’s shop wouldn’t have lasted long once the goons had let themselves free with the looting, and other than a tube of hemorrhoid cream she seemed to be right. Doc Mills glared at all of them in equal measure, but let Raj and Mary approach him. For two minutes they spoke softly, with Corbell scowling at her every time she made a move to get closer.
“Once more for the witnesses,” Mills said louder.
“I do,” Raj and Mary said at once.
“All right.” The doctor sighed. “You’re married. It’s as legal as I can make it, if you care. Kiss her, you idiot.”
Raj obliged, and the doctor pushed his way between the Miner and a stunned Corbell. Mills paused next to the Miner and muttered, “Finn’s dead,” before he moved along like he hadn’t said anything. She blinked and watched him go, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach.
The two of them hadn’t been dismissed, exactly, so much as made the mutual decision to stand guard outside when the kiss got hotter and clothes started coming off. They stood on opposite sides of the door once Corbell managed to drag it closed, and the silence between them became increasingly uncomfortable as the noises inside got louder.
“This, uh, this what you were expecting?” Corbell finally asked.
“No.”
“Yeah... Mary was pretty tight-lipped, but I heard her calling off an ambush down here, clearing the area. They were pissed.”
“That so?”
“Pretty pissed, yeah.” He glanced her up and down, his eyes lingering on the hand resting on her sword. “You’re pretty good with that thing, huh.”
“Seems that way.”
“Bunch of people want to teach you a lesson.”
“That so?”
“They’re pretty good too.”
“That’s nice.”
“We did all right after you left, you know.”
The Miner shrugged.
“We’re not just idiots and assholes. We gave as good as we got.”
They stood, leaving that sentiment in the air, and the Miner felt ridiculous standing. She wanted to do something, felt frustrated and angry about Finn. Corbell gave up and rested his head against the wall with a soft thump. They hadn’t gotten the door all the way closed, and from outside the shop the vigorous humping sounded like busted hydraulics. Corbell fidgeted, shifting his weight from leg to leg, and she was pretty sure that finger was on its way to a nostril at one point before he caught himself.
“You want to, uh...”
“No,” she said.
“Right. Right.”
The Miner stood and brooded. The fighting was still going on elsewhere. Without this wedding, it would grind down into chaotic vendettas. Feeney and Angelica would be bust. Mr Shine and the Morlocks were ready to step in and enforce a new peace. Her plan had worked, except... Well, when those two newlyweds came out, that was her plan blown to hell. She fingered the hilt of her sword absentmindedly.
“Ditz is dead,” Corbell said suddenly. The Miner took a moment to put the name to the face of one of the older toughs, a stringy happy-looking guy.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“He was a good guy.”
“I didn’t know him,” she said, feeling awkward. “I’m sorry.”
He kept going, though she wished he wouldn’t. “I thought I hated him. You know? He was so annoying and he shot people he shouldn’t have, and he was high all the time. Like seriously, high all the time. I know other people got killed, too. You killed some of them. It’s just, I didn’t expect to miss him, and I do.”
The Miner looked at her embarrassed counterpart once the verbal torrent dried up, and felt for a moment a pang of sympathy. “You pick your pain,” she said.
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean? I didn’t want to hang out with him.”
She shook her head. “We all do. If you choose to b
e with people, you choose the misery that comes with losing them. It’s a gamble. Maybe they lose you first. You could have been an asshole to him, pushed him away. But you got something out of being friends, and now it hurts. Doesn’t mean you picked wrong, just that you paid the piper sooner than you’d rather.”
He made an undignified snuffling noise, and she chose not to look. “Yeah? What did you pick?”
She was about to say, “talking to morons” and instead found herself saying “I picked a ship and a plant room, and no more attachments.”
The noises and groans inside subsided, and there was a long stretch of two silences: a suspicious one inside and a relieved one outside. She found herself drumming her fingers on the sheath of her sword, trying not to hear giggling.
She heard their surprise and aggravation trying to drag the door open. It gave her plenty of time to step aside, get ready. One on three, with the three in this shape, no problem. Maybe just one on two, she didn’t care if Corbell got away. The door came free in a second, and a rumpled half-dressed Mary appeared. She yawned happily and stretched. “All right, you bastards,” she said pleasantly. “Time to go tell our darling families.”
The Miner looked at the beaming young woman and her new husband grinning bashfully behind her. “Congratulations,” she said, and walked away.
SIX MONTHS AND A BUNCH OF DEAD BODIES AGO
Angelica put her hands flat on the table and leaned across it. She looked into each set of worried, frightened, pissed-off eyes in turn. All of Feeney’s main people, or most of them: Neha “Sparks” Laghari, who ran the chop shop; Zackie Morgan, who wrangled the sex workers; Peder Finn, who ran the distillery and brewery; Xiao Han, who ran the drug lab; Rafael, who managed smuggling operations. Then, too, there was that Anaconda guy, whats-his-name, Gordonson, who was pretty thoroughly in the old man’s pocket and insisted on having his say at length about this little trouble with Wilfred. Only Shine was missing, since he refused to have anything to do with it, and Mary for obvious reasons. Raj leaned against the back wall, playing with his knife and looking uncomfortable.
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