The orchids were a different story. Four of them, including the purple-and-white Phalaenopsis, were completely beyond saving. She shook the loose moss and soil from their roots for use in repotting the others, and placed their mangled forms in the digester. Two were in reasonable shape: the white Dendrobium with its tiny star-like flowers, and the extravagant yellow and purple Cattleya. These she repotted and carefully tied to new stakes, trimming back damaged leaves and flowers.
The rest, she could possibly save with a great deal of work and care. She put them in the digester.
It took twenty minutes to repair and re-string the watering system, and then to mop up the floor so that she’d know whether it was leaking or not. Three trees and two flowers stood in the light of the remaining grow lamps in the middle of three rows of empty benches. When she finally put away the tape and shears, her hands trembled from suppressed rage. She forced herself to wash them in the sink, barely noticing the tiny stings from scrapes and cuts as the soap got into them.
Her bunk had been ransacked as badly as the hold. The blanket had been thrown off, and the sheets and mattress bore long, gaping knife wounds. Her drawers and closets were thrown open, though the inexpert vandals hadn’t found the hidden compartments. The slim black box under the bed had been dumped out, and the tangled ribbons bore bootprints. Her rifle was gone. Through the growing red haze of fury, something in the back of her head took that in and said, That’s interesting.
She picked up her medals and placed them back in the box, finding one of the twelve missing. She patted the floor looking for it, then snapped the box shut and slid it back under the bed, wondering if whoever had dumped them out had known what they were, what they were for. Wounded in action. Valor. Skill. Quick thinking and resourcefulness. Desperation, fury, and revenge in only tangential service of someone else’s cause. She tried to remember if the missing honor had had her name on it, or if she’d ground that one smooth, too.
She found the pictures that had fallen off the bulkhead and put them in the drawer. Making the bed and covering over the large rents full of mattress stuffing made her feel silly, but the physical activity calmed her. Her sword at her hip kept whacking the hatchway when she turned in the small space, reminding her of what she ached to be doing right then.
Focus, she told herself. She went to the cockpit and found it operational. Whoever had done this had wanted to make sure she could still flee. They hadn’t damaged the equipment, but there was a distinct and overpowering smell of urine. Fucking barbarians. Fucking amateurs.
Just because they didn’t trash the hardware didn’t mean they hadn’t trashed the software. She started up the ship’s computer in emergency mode, found a backup from before she’d docked, and reactivated from that.
“Hello, boss!”
“Full diagnostics,” she ordered, and waited. The cockpit view of the station dock exterior showed it to be pathetically empty. Flight control showed a lonely ship way out past the nav beacons, probably an arrival. Maybe more recruits for the fight. Maybe another miner, who’d have to deal with cheats and a lockdown and still not be able to sell their ore.
“Finished, boss!” She jumped when the computer finally responded. The results popped up on the nearest panel, and she scanned them. Most everything was fine, which didn’t surprise her: they seemed to want to hurt her, but leave her able to flee. Some interior cameras offline. Life support in the escape pod offline.
She went to have a look at the escape pod, and groaned. Someone had wrenched open one of the panels, yanked the air filtration system completely out of its socket, then inexpertly jammed it all back in. Three wires were broken. If she ever tried to use it like this, she’d probably be dead in minutes. Legally, she could swap it out at any station for a standard fee and let them deal with it – but that would require her to notice ahead of time, and at this station she’d rather fix it herself, thanks. No time to just then, though.
That discovery prompted another thought. Did they disable the escape pod out of spite, or did they intend to force her to use it? She went back to the list of offline cameras and went on a hunt. There was only one camera out in a compartment that seemed untouched: the engine room. It didn’t take long to find the little package behind an access panel, a flashbang grenade wired up to a remote detonator. She told the ship to do a full sweep of the interior space, and to remind her to do her own sweep later. After all, it was poor practice to only leave one present behind.
She stripped down and threw the diamond fiber undersuit in the washer, then indulged in a lukewarm shower herself. She dressed in clean clothes and lay out the armaments they’d left her. Flechette pistol went on her right hip, with the sword opposite. The shotgun would be useful, but clumsy without a harness, and the harness for the rifle was presumably still attached to the rifle. Grenades from the secret drawer compartment went into her thigh pockets.
With everything else done, she checked the exterior camera carefully and then crept from her ship, locking it up tightly this time with the law enforcement override disabled, and made her way across the deck. The lights were still down low. In the dockmaster’s shack, she pulled up the terminal control, found the notification routine that had been attached to her airlock, and triggered it manually.
Five minutes’ wait was enough. Six black-uniformed security team members showed up, heavily armed and armored. They swept out into a cursory search of the darker port, flashlight beams sweeping quickly every which way. Amateurs. They took up positions around the airlock entrance to her empty ship, looking tense. The one on the far left, after some rapidly-hissed back-and-forth, darted forward and jabbed at the access pad for a little while.
The Miner studied the dockmaster’s terminal, but couldn’t find an intercom program. She did find a gas purge function, to cycle atmosphere in the airlock – a nice noisy affair. She triggered it, and the security team immediately dropped into a crouch behind their riot shields, bringing up their rifles. While they were distracted, she crept out to a pallet not too far from her ship and watched. Not the best position, but reasonably well-hidden in the dark and she could get back to the shack without trouble.
“Yeah, she’s in there,” someone said.
“Trapped like a rat,” someone else said, prompting nervous tittering from the other five would-be cats. The Miner considered a well-tossed grenade, but was out of practice and didn’t want to damage the airlock.
She wanted to stay and observe longer, but without knowing whether backup was coming she decided to observe from further away. Halfway back to the dockmaster’s shack, her ship paged her: “Message, boss!”
She rushed the rest of the way there, as quietly as she could, then very carefully closed the mechanical door. The keyed-up guards didn’t seem to have heard anything. She tapped slowly on the plastic, a few seconds apart and louder each time. At the sixth tap, one of them turned a helmeted head quizzically.
“Patch it through,” she muttered, making sure her voice stayed quieter than the fifth tap.
“Attention, fugitive,” came McMasters’ voice in her head. She didn’t respond.
“I said, attention, fugitive.”
“Sorry. Thought you were talking to someone else. What did you say?”
“I said, atten…” Silence. “You certainly are a great deal of trouble.”
“That so?”
“I want you to know that I’m being extremely generous here. It would be a trivial matter to have my people board your ship, take you prisoner, and remand you for trial. But frankly, I’m not interested in you. You told the dockmaster that you intended to leave as soon as your business here is done, and I’m telling you: your business here is done.”
“That’s it? Fuck off and sin no more?”
“Somehow I consider that last part unlikely. Just leave.”
“What if I don’t feel like it?”
“Then my people will take you into custody. Assuming you aren’t accidentally killed resisting arrest. That does unfo
rtunately happen sometimes, Grace Molina.”
She winced. He tried so hard to be menacing, and was so bad at it.
“Seems to me,” she said, “you had Angelica’s brother killed so you don’t lose your nice position. Maybe I’m a convenient scapegoat to keep her from killing you right back. I guess that’s a hell of a lot easier story to tell if I turn tail and run.”
“Well,” he said after a long silence. “At least we understand each other.”
“I don’t think we do,” she said, keeping an eye on the security team still watching an empty airlock. “Your people trashed my ship and stole my service rifle. You’re going to pay for that.”
“You’re in no position to negotiate.”
“I’m hunkered down with the rifle you didn’t find and the explosives you didn’t find and six months of water and rations. Maybe del Rio won’t believe my story, but she’ll sure as hell be willing to clear out your little guard detail to come hear my piece.”
“Five thousand credits.”
“That’ll cover the Phalaenopsis.”
“What the devil’s a Phalaenopsis?”
“Something that’ll cost you five thousand credits. I figure a hundred grand will make us even for the damage. Call it a buck twenty to get on my good side.”
“A hundred and twenty thousand credits! Are you drunk? I could buy your ship twice over for that much.”
“Could be. But that’s not what you’re buying. Think it over.”
She cut the connection and watched the half-dozen armored goons for a while longer. They were already losing discipline waiting, with two turned toward each other and chatting, and another actually sitting on the floor. She wondered if any of them had been the ones to trash her ship. It wouldn’t be too hard to take them all out, even without using a grenade.
Instead, she triggered another gas purge. She spent a brief moment enjoying their panic, then used the distraction to make her getaway.
LET’S PLAY FIND THE SNIPER
The port section had exits into the back maintenance tunnels, and the Miner used these to make her escape. She had food, water, her sword, and a pistol. All she needed was an actual plan.
The maintenance tunnels were just old hallways, blocked off with reconfigurable walls so that visitors wouldn’t get into them. Her footfalls echoed along their lengths. The fights had battered both the gangs down, and she knew they didn’t have the strength to patrol, but McMasters’ crew had come out fine. Minus the six idiots camped out at her airlock, and probably a good-sized crew guarding McMasters himself, still left enough to cause her trouble. She walked as quietly as she could, then, and thought as she went. Knowing that McMasters had been behind killing Raj didn’t help her unless she could prove it. She wished she’d thought to record the call. Even then, though, if she could provoke Angelica into going to war against security, that would only cement Feeney. Why should she do that, if she could bring all three sides down. Give Herrera the clean slate he deserved.
She’d studied the back passage layout earlier, and anyway they were pretty easy to navigate. The first few intersections had had security cameras, and she’d dealt with them as she came across them, but quickly realized that they were already defunct. What a rat hole.
It was station night, and the lockdown had been lifted while she’d been on her ship. Usually Herrera went back to his quarters, and she hoped that had been the plan that night, since she didn’t dare use station comms to get ahold of him. Between Angelica and McMasters, the chance of interception was just too high.
On the opposite side of the galleria from Feeney’s hotel jutted a big blocky cluster of compartments, above the casino but not connected to it. They had been officers’ quarters once upon a time, and judging by the map those quarters had been reconfigured into damn near palatial digs. She slowed and waited against an inside wall at the sound of a footfall. A lone security guard wandered, waving a rifle like a cumbersome stick. She was in the right area, anyway.
Herrera’s quarters, as station master, were easy to get to, and easy to identify by the “FUCK YOU MCMASTERS AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON OR MAYBE THE HORSE FUCKS YOU AND I WATCH” graffiti.
She stopped to admire the sentiment, then froze. Across from the graffiti, in the middle of the corridor wall, stood a pillar. She frowned at it, then back at the scrawl. Herrera didn’t feel the need to simply express himself like that. She crept up to the pillar the long way around and pulled a mirror from her pocket. Angled down low and around, she could see it: one of McMasters’ security cameras, active and pointed squarely at Herrera’s handiwork. “Bless your obscene little soul,” she murmured.
Knowing it was there, and where, she easily knocked it out with her sword. She dashed to Herrera’s door and urgently rang the bell. When he finally arrived, disheveled and sleepy, she pushed her way in.
“They’ll come see why the camera’s disabled,” she explained. He nodded and closed the door.
His quarters were immense, easily bigger than her ship. A nice red and brown rug took up most of the floor, and the walls bore paintings and a few coarse woven hangings.
“So what’s going on?”
The Miner filled him in on McMasters trashing her ship and the conversation about the sniper.
“The way I figure it, whoever shot Raj was one of his guards. Who else can McMasters trust, on short notice? That means somewhere on this station is a cop with sharpshooter training.”
He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “So why come to me? What can I do?”
“McMasters works for you.”
He swore. “That sonofabitch brothel-bred plague louse. Works for me? Fuck! I ought to… You. You kill that bastard. You kill him and you bring me his goddamn mustache so I can nail it to my wall! You–”
The Miner held up her hands to placate him. “On paper, I mean. Technically. On paper he works for you, right?”
“Oh.” His mood went from furious to mild in an instant. “Sure, I fired him like eight times.”
“That means you’ve got access to personnel records, right?”
A slow grin crept across his face. He had just started to dash across the room when the door chime rang. The Miner nodded once at Herrera’s look of warning, and stepped aside into the next room.
“What do you want?” she heard Herrera say.
“I want you to quit breaking our fucking cameras, you old asshole.”
“I have registered your complaint and will forward it to the appropriate department. That all?”
“No.”
The Miner tensed to hear the too-familiar sound of a punch landing. She heard him groan heavily and there was a heavier thud.
“Now quit fucking with our cameras. And Christ, don’t puke on my boots, either.”
She was back in the room before the door finished closing, and helped Herrera up off the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“Shut up,” he wheezed, and took a moment. “Not the first time these emotionally stunted ass hair lice come beat me up.” He straightened himself up enough to look her in the eye, and the look on his face was defiant. “Might just be the last, though.”
The Miner just nodded, and eventually got the hint that he wanted to recover his breath and his dignity without her help. She stood and waited as he did some stretches, got an ice pack, then pulled up the HR info. His visibility into the system was impressive: not just bios, but discipline records, body camera footage, even the duty roster and patrol assignments. She grinned, but first things first: figure out who they were looking for. Herrera pulled up the personnel records and dragged half of it onto a separate spot on the wall so they could look through in parallel.
She read through the dozen or so bios carefully, ranked by time on the job. The first few were pretty detailed: not exactly career law enforcement, but tours in the military or stretches with security on other stations, with dates and in two cases mild commendations. When she checked, her guess that they’d already been on the
job when McMasters started proved accurate. After that, things got spottier. Military experience with start dates but no end dates – usually a sign of desertion or a covered-up expulsion. An eighteen year-old claiming to be a brigadier general. The last few just had names and ages; one of them was purportedly a hundred years old.
“Hey,” Herrera said, tapping at one of the entries on his side. “What about this one, Gloria Settles. Five years in the service, three target shooting prizes and a sharpshooter’s rating. Came on at the same time as McMasters himself.”
The Miner raised her eyebrow. She was about to agree when she was distracted by the entry at the bottom of Herrera’s list. No bio, just a name. She tapped it and left her finger there. “No,” she said. “This guy.”
AN OLD FRIEND
Fergus Capper tried for a good five minutes, leaning this way and that, digging in under the plating or kinda mashing down from above, working in vain to figure out how to scratch his balls in that damn armor and finally gave it up for a lost cause. Captain McMasters had been pretty damn clear that they needed to wear it whenever they left the bunkroom now, and after the shit he’d seen lately, he believed it. But his balls still itched. Kayla passed him a cardboard bottle of something that smelled like gun cleaner. She smirked at him like she knew what he was doing, but he’d been pretty subtle about it so she probably didn’t.
He took a swig, and good lord was it awful. He pounded his chest – not that it helped (again: armor) – and coughed.
“Strong stuff, huh?” Kayla smirked. He smiled and raised the bottle heartily. He pretended to take another swig, numbing his tongue, and passed it on to Oggy.
Oggy took a moment to take it, leaving Fergus to hold it out like an asshole while he dug around at his hip and came up with his stun baton. “Check this out,” he said, finally taking the bottle. “I hit one of those shits so hard I broke the stun thing.”
Red Noise Page 27