Red Noise

by John P. Murphy

  “Yup,” said the Miner, and held up the duct tape.

  REJECTED ADVANCE

  “And you brought her here? Are you out of your everloving mind? She’s a cop! You have to let her go!”

  Takata’s voice rose to a squeak. He stared at the hog-tied black-uniformed sniper, who in turn was scanning the darkened restaurant kitchen with terrified eyes.

  “Well look,” said the Miner. “If I go to Feeney I won’t get a word in edgewise. And if I go to Angelica, they’ll just kill her outright, leaving me without a bargaining chip.”

  The sniper whimpered.

  “So you brought her here?”

  “What can I say, I lack imagination. Have you heard from Herrera?”

  “He’s at home, in bed, sleeping. Which is what I should be doing, instead of serving drinks to kidnappers and murderers and lunatics!”

  “You haven’t served us any drinks.”

  “Well I got it half right, anyway. You’re out of your mind. Are you the one who blew something up in the galleria?”

  The Miner considered her options. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, she says.”

  “A lot goes on, you might be referring to a different explosion.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “You should listen,” the Miner heard in stereo. She and Takata both turned to see Mary Feeney standing in the back door, arms folded. She had dark circles under her puffy red eyes, her tattooed skin was blotchy, and her lips were set so tightly they were white. She looked like hell.

  “Hello, Mary,” said the Miner.

  “Hello, Jane. I hear one of you killed my husband.”

  The Miner pointed at the sniper, who probably would have pointed back if she hadn’t been tied up.

  “So you say. McMasters says different.”

  “McMasters has six people standing guard outside my ship where they have me cornered.”

  Mary blinked and coughed what might have been a laugh. “Christ, what an asshole.”

  “Seriously.”

  “But just being an asshole doesn’t make him wrong. He showed us your rifle. He showed us your medal for sharpshooting. He told us that you admitted to trying to destabilize this station.”

  “That’s all true,” the Miner said. “But I didn’t kill Raj. Won’t say it didn’t cross my mind, or even that I didn’t think he had it coming. But I didn’t kill him.”

  Mary frowned. The sniper made muffled noises through the gag. “Takata, was she really here?”

  “Oh, the other shoe drops! This is why you invaded my restaurant in the middle of the night, so I can alibi you? Forget it. You want an alibi, go wake up Herrera. He was here.” He seemed to realize what he’d just said. “Shit. Go to hell, both of you.”

  The Miner shrugged. “Can’t have it plainer than that.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can.”

  The Miner didn’t reply, just rubbed her injured hand. Even with the painkillers she’d grabbed from the infirmary it still throbbed. She had a change of bandages, real ones, but hadn’t had time to put them on. Mary stared at her a long time, then swore. “Give her to me. We’ll want to question her.”

  “She’s no good to me dead,” the Miner said, shifting her weight so that more of her body stood between Mary and the sniper. “Not while Angelica still wants to kill me.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine.”

  They stared at each other until Mary sighed. “We won’t kill her. That’d be too convenient for you if you’re lying.” She unholstered her pistol. “Come on, you. On your feet.”

  The sniper thrashed when they tried to pick her up, slamming her bound feet so hard against Takata’s cabinets that the doors dented and plastic plates tumbled and clattered on the deck. Even at gunpoint, she refused to stand on her own, so that finally Mary called for a couple of goons. The Miner watched without helping as four of them managed to wrangle the struggling cop by just picking her up by the twisted tape.

  Mary studied the squirming form and frowned. “Bring her to the old man,” she said. “Tell him I want her kept alive and able to talk.”

  She got four uncertain nods in reply, but she didn’t wait to see them. Ignoring Takata’s protests, she walked quickly and purposefully out of the kitchen, navigated the bar floor in the dark, then punched the button to raise the shutters. The Miner stayed back in the shadows.

  “Where are you going?” called one of the goons. The Miner recognized her, but not well.

  “To talk to my sister-in-law.”

  “Woah, woah, wait, what?” The goon looked alarmed, and left her three cohorts to deal with the struggling captive. She shoved past the Miner. “Wait a sec, Mary.”

  She held up a hand. “I know. But he was her brother. She deserves to be in on this.”

  “Man... I dunno.”

  Mary’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know either. But it’s high time we ended this shit. That means trusting each other, and that means someone goes first. Go on. I want to see you leave.”

  The Miner watched from the kitchen doorway as they exchanged dubious looks and hauled their captive out the back.

  “This is probably dumb,” the Miner said.

  “Are they gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mary set off across the galleria, head held high. The Miner watched her go.

  “See, this is going to backfire, too.” Takata had a bowl of oatmeal or something and was eating. It smelled amazing. He didn’t offer her any. “You think you’re going to rile them up again, but they like their little equilibrium.”

  “I thought you hated the status quo.”

  “I do, but I hate the open fighting more.” He sighed and set down his spoon. “Look. Yeah, I’d rather that asshole McMasters did his job and ran them all out of here. But you’re not going to push him to do that, you’re just going to get him killed.”

  “He’s got it coming.”

  “Why? Because he fucked up your ship?”

  “Because he stood by taking bribes while this station went to hell. Because he had someone assassinated in the middle of the goddamn galleria so he could keep taking those bribes. Because he was going to fucking pin it on me.” Takata gave her a level gaze until she threw up her hands. “And yeah, all right, because he fucked up my ship. My homicidal urges, my rules.”

  “You’ve killed a lot of people yourself, you know.”

  “Never said I didn’t have it coming, too.”

  An ornately-tattooed kid with horns burst from Angelica’s casino and dashed across the galleria. The Miner ran out to meet her, and when she didn’t stop, pulled her sword left-handed.

  She reared back. “Get out of my way! I have to deliver a message.”

  The Miner stared at her, wondering who Angelica considered more expendable than electrons. “I’ll come too.”

  The messenger stared at the sword and didn’t argue. Which was just as well, as they’d gotten attention from the security station. Two armored guards came out, sidearms drawn. The Miner followed the messenger at a jog up the stairs to Feeney’s hotel where a crowd had already seen the runner and emerged en masse. The messenger doubled over wheezing after the run up the stairs, and gasped out that Angelica had Feeney’s granddaughter and would trade for the sniper.

  It didn’t take long for the message to filter up to the old man, who came out roaring that he’d kill that backstabber. He fumed and raged, and he made one of his soldiers restrain the messenger. He growled instructions to different people who jumped and ran.

  Mr Shine strolled out of the hotel, still in his tuxedo, but with his arm in a sling. He looked like he’d just been woken up. He walked up to Feeney and tried to say a few words in his ear, but Feeney had none of it. He paced and ranted and hurled invective at Angelica and her “idiot brother” who, in his telling, had probably – if with difficulty – committed suicide. Someone came out and passed him a little red megaphone that had ridges like it’d been
printed in a hurry.

  “Angelica! Get out here, you damned snake, and bring my granddaughter.”

  The casino window’s neon dice rolled in silence, coming up double-sixes for the umpteenth time. The Miner was starting to think they were loaded.

  “Goddamn you, get out here!”

  “In my own time, old man.” Angelica’s reply came over some kind of loudspeaker, and was hard to hear over the crowd. “Cool your jets.”

  HORSE TRADING

  The tables and chairs of the galleria sat under the sun lamps strong enough that the Miner wondered if Angelica was waiting for high noon. A number of tables were knocked over or broken, and smashed chair parts decorated the aisles. Bloodstains marked furniture and deck alike, and even the trees had been splashed. Takata had lowered his shutters. Herrera was still asleep, anyway; he’d miss the fun.

  Feeney had seen the Miner and insisted that she stick around. She maybe could have objected, maybe forcefully, but she was tired and her hand hurt and she liked the view from up above. The rest of them had retreated inside the hotel, leaving her the sole human occupant of the galleria now that McMasters’ crew had withdrawn, rebuffed angrily by Feeney and Angelica both. The empty space stank of blood and ozone, and the only sound was the whir of the anti-projectile lasers.

  Mr Shine emerged from one of the side spurs off the galleria, alone. The Miner hadn’t seen him leave; maybe he’d gone out through the service entrance. Smart move, it made him appear more independent. He projected confidence as he walked, slowly and deliberately. His sling was gone, but that arm seemed pretty firmly lodged with his thumb hooked in his red cummerbund. He strolled to the middle of the galleria, to the stage under the sad-looking palm trees. As power plays went, the Miner had to respect it. With McMasters under suspicion, he was setting himself up as the grown-up here, making sure everyone played nice. She felt like she was watching a coronation.

  The casino doors rolled open and three columns of somber-looking fighters came out, armored with miscellaneous bits and mismatched helmets, carrying clubs and swords. The Miner recognized some of them as having been Feeney’s crew. Fickle bunch, she thought. Behind the fighters, looking defeated as she stared at her feet over tied hands, shuffled Mary Feeney. Angelica walked behind her, holding something to her back that was covered in a jacket. The Miner considered that a nice touch, paying a kind of homage to the firearms rule.

  The entourage jerked to a halt at the foot of the steps up to the stage. Their grimy faces looked for the first time like real soldiers. Behind them, the dice rolled too many sixes.

  Mr Shine nodded once to Angelica, then took his uninjured hand out of his pocket and gestured casually up at the hotel: come on.

  Feeney fussed as he tried to assemble an honor guard of his own around the terrified bound sniper, who was still thrashing but kept on her feet. Eventually he managed a box formation, and the Miner heard him tell them to keep her on her feet until Mary was safe. The phalanx managed the stairs with a small amount of dignity, and slowly navigated the furniture-crowded aisle toward the center of the galleria.

  Mr Shine held up his hand, and they came with ill grace to a halt. “All right,” he said, and his calm deep voice was loud enough he had to have arranged a mic. Again, the Miner was impressed with his sense of theatre. She wasn’t thrilled to replace Angelica and Feeney with this puffed-up king-in-waiting, but she felt the world owed Takata a bit of real peace.

  If there was more to that sentence than “all right”, the Miner never heard it. Black-uniformed security officers poured out of the shuttered stores on both sides and surrounded the two groups. McMasters and ten more armored guards emerged from the security station. She couldn’t quite tell, but she was reasonably sure that McMasters had waxed his mustache for the occasion. He must have woken up the entire complement of station security for this. They were all armed with stun batons, but a few of them had sidearms, and McMasters himself carried a rifle – the Miner’s rifle, in fact.

  “Surrender these two to me,” McMasters said loudly. “I’m the law here, and I’ll handle the criminals.”

  Settles seemed to visibly relax, and stopped struggling.

  All eyes shifted to Mr Shine, and he was frozen. The confident smile had turned into a rictus grin. He still had his left thumb hooked in his cummerbund, and the right hand was outstretched in a gesture of unclear intent. The king-in-waiting was apparently on standby. The various goons on all sides shuffled nervously, unsure what was going on or what would happen next. Angelica looking back and forth between Shine and McMasters. Feeney had come up beside the Miner and was clutching the railing white-knuckled. “What is that fool doing?” he whispered to himself. “Don’t let McMasters have them, Shine, you jackass! Say something!”

  “The hell you will,” Angelica snarled, when Shine said nothing. “You’re just protecting your attack dog.”

  The smirk on McMasters’ face was visible a mile away. “If you really thought that, Ms del Rio, you wouldn’t have taken the Feeney girl hostage. You still think Mr Feeney had your brother killed, hired that psychotic killer up there to do it, or we wouldn’t be out here. You’re probably right.” He raised the rifle a tad and chambered a round. His deputies hovered around him in a loose knot, probably terrified under their black helmets.

  Mr Shine stood paralyzed. He started to say something, and stopped and stammered, and the microphone echoed his stammering. McMasters and Angelica eyeballed each other, ignoring him. Feeney’s goons guarding the sniper looked increasingly worried as security advanced on them.

  The Miner never had much patience for standoffs, nor for indecision. She still had a pretty decent throwing arm despite all the years in low gravity, but of course the security people were well-armored against rocks and bottles, and had been pelted half-heartedly by both Feeney’s and Angelica’s crews in the past. They were used to it. So it took about a second for one of them to glance down at the object she’d thrown, and then another half second to complete a double-take and yell, “Grenade!”

  The security team had time to scatter, and some of them even did. McMasters threw himself to the floor, where someone with more viciousness than sense gave him a swift kick before the explosion blew the scene into bedlam.

  The armored security goons engaged with the fighters from both sides indiscriminately as more poured down the stairs from Feeney’s hotel and out from the casino. “Get Mary! Goddamn you bastards, get Mary!” Feeney howled, forgetting his megaphone and hanging halfway over the railing. He turned and saw the Miner and grabbed her jumpsuit in two handfuls. “Mick! I’ll give you ten thousand credits if you rescue her. I swear it to God Almighty, I will.”

  There wasn’t a need, though: Mary had shaken loose of Angelica and was barreling through the crowd. Up past Mr Shine onto the dais, then down into Feeney’s crew. Bleeding and limping, she used her tied forearms as a shield as she caromed off tables and through a swarm of assholes eager for a fight.

  Everyone froze at the crack of a rifle. Mary stumbled and fell over a table, then down to the deck. The Miner didn’t think before she vaulted the railing, and landed hard with her implant-assisted joints screaming. Her left leg exploded in pain, but she could still move it, and she dashed for Mary.

  On the other side of the galleria, where she’d been thrashing and kicking at Angelica’s goons dragging her away, the sniper’s body spasmed, went slack, and fell. Angelica screamed frustration and fury, but her guards dragged her bodily away into the safety of the casino.

  The screams and thuds and the crackles of stun batons were joined by gunshots and flashes from the anti-projectile lasers. Mr Shine stumbled, and went to his knees.

  McMasters fumbled with the rifle again, turning toward where Mary had dived under a table, but instead used it as a bat to fend off a huge bare-chested fighter with stun knuckles on both fists. Somewhere, the Miner could have sworn she heard a chainsaw rev. McMasters fell back and hoarsely called the retreat, squeezing off one more shot into the
crowd as he and his team fled the field. Confused, pissed off, and probably drunk, the crowd turned into an enthusiastically bloody mosh pit.

  The Miner reached Mary, her knee screaming. She pulled the still-bound woman from under the table, and hauled her to her feet. Mary leaned on her hard enough that her spikes gouged the Miner’s neck and cheek and drew blood, but they were both so charged with adrenaline that they sprinted through the crowd anyway. Judging the stairs too hard to get to, the Miner steered them to a bench outside a shuttered VR joint, sheltered by the stairway and just beneath the anti-projectile lasers.

  “I’m fucking done with this shit.” Mary heaved a sigh that could have been a sob or a laugh, then spat something out that looked like a tooth. “I am so done. So fucking done. And where...” She closed her eyes for a moment and her head bobbed a little. “Where the fuck did you get a grenade? Are you out of your mind?”

  Then she ruined the Miner’s comeback by passing out.

  UTILITY FUNCTIONS

  Screwball Corbell crouched behind the inner bulkhead, four of Feeney’s people lined up along it behind him. It was hard to hear; the giant air-movers below them rumbled and roared as they breathed for the station. Eight decks above, if there was a quiet spot in the galleria, you could hear them if you listened carefully; down here right on top of them you couldn’t hear anything else. The nice thing was that he couldn’t hear the complaining. The bad thing was that it left him with nothing to do but think.

  They were supposed to hang out in case Angelica made a move. She’d taken Mary hostage and could be planning anything. They had Shine’s blessing to be there, as long as they didn’t actually go in. Five at the air handler control center, five at the water reclamation center. God, they were stretched thin. Shine had been stuck in the hotel, drinking with the old man, and Corbell was pretty sure the big guy was thoroughly under the old man’s thumb. Ditz had said Feeney was magnetic, but it was kind of amazing to watch in real time. “Say, do you remember that Calishkan kid?” turned into belly laughs and “Let me fill your drink there” and a sly “This has all gotten out of hand, don’t you think?” with Raj’s body not even cold, and Corbell’s good socks stuck to his ankles with dried blood. He was sort of amazed the casino man fell for it. Living down in the bottom of the station for six months, though, probably he wanted to.