Red Noise

by John P. Murphy

  He was starting to feel foolish when one of the others jerked her head up suddenly, looking concerned and alert. She had been one of Angelica’s, he thought, her and that guy in the stupid fake leather sling – Carter, the one who lost his head and started shooting when they were running from that bomb, the one who shot Ditz.

  Corbell opened his mouth to bellow a question, and then he heard it too – a shout from inside, and then a gunshot. The wide stares on the other faces meant they’d heard it too.

  “Shit,” he said to himself, and then louder, “Come on!”

  The old man had given him a nice pistol, and Corbell had it ready when he entered the control room. Five armed jerks stood away on the other side with a couple of Shine’s people cringing at their feet, and fortunately Corbell surprised them, because he had time to duck behind some big control cabinet thing before they had their own guns up and shot the poor jerk who came through the door behind him. He cringed at the echo of the gunshots in the enclosed space, but made himself peer around the other side of the big metal box and squeeze off two shots. He crouched back down behind cover without checking or caring if he hit.

  “Don’t hit Shine’s people,” he yelled, as much to reassure Shine’s people as to direct his own. He really hoped those were Angelica’s people attacking; he had no idea whose side anyone was on anymore unless they were physically on the other side of a room.

  His ears rang with the gunshots. There was no sense in shouting instructions; he saw two of his people just outside the hatch, one wounded and the other tending to her. It wasn’t Carter shot, worse luck. That sadistic SOB was crouched down behind some kind of console on the other side, and a totally bald woman he didn’t recognize came and crouched down right behind Corbell himself. Carter stood and shot and ducked again, grinning. The bald woman glanced at Corbell, and looked relieved when he shook his head.

  Instead, he made eye contact with the woman outside the room tending to the wounded. He mouthed “how many?” twice before she ducked her head real fast into the room, and held up three fingers. He nodded. Carter stood again, but dove at the ground before he could fire; three shots came from the other side.

  Corbell tried not to hyperventilate. His stomach felt sour and his ears hurt, and when he braced himself against the console his shoe came off and he had to scrabble to keep from falling. He frowned, looked at the bald woman, and mouthed “on three”. Then he turned on one knee, shouted “fire in the hole!” as loud as he could, and stood and hurled his shoe.

  Angelica’s goons dove. Corbell and the bald woman stood and fired, and Carter figured it out and joined in. Then Shine’s people grabbed chairs and started beating on the downed fighters, kicking their guns away. The rest took maybe a minute.

  One of Shine’s people was hurt bad. They were older, nerdy types, and looked scared shitless even after beating three of Angelica’s goons to death. Probably more scared. The one of Feeney’s who’d been shot was only grazed, he thought, but there was a lot of blood. They shut the doors and the noise got a lot quieter. Feeney’s people cheered.

  Nobody really knew first aid, but they got strips of cloth tied off, and the bleeding seemed to stop. There was an inner office, even quieter. Corbell went into it to see if he could figure out what the hell was going on in the rest of the station, and the ringing in his ears subsided almost enough to hear. His fingers trembled with the adrenaline spillover; he felt like he was about to either fall to pieces or run a damn marathon.

  “Hey hey,” Carter crowed, grinning and slapping his uninjured hand on Corbell’s shoulder. Was that the hand that shot Ditz? “Little Screwball won us a battle!”

  Corbell whirled on Carter and slammed him against the wall, wedging his pistol up under the man’s jaw.

  “My name is Corbell, asshole. Steven Corbell. Say it.”

  “Ste- Ste-”

  “Steven Corbell,” Corbell started, and Carter recited it with him, eyes wide.

  “If you can’t remember it, call me ‘Sir’. You are not my buddy. You have not earned the right to call me that. Do you understand me? All you assholes, do you understand me?”

  “Y- yes.” Carter said, and then the others repeated it.

  Corbell let him go, and he fell. “Now get the fuck out of here,” he ordered, and once they all had left the little office, he shut the door and puked in the corner.

  TIME TO BLOW THIS SCENE

  “So, uh, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but, uh, what’s wrong with this place?”

  The short, round man eating a plate of Takata’s pasta had plainly been pondering this question for some time, looking for a delicate way to ask. After all, in order to get to Ama no Gawa from the port, which is where he had come from, he had had to walk through the galleria. The galleria, though corpse-free for two whole hours, was still a mess. Rug-sized smears of blood marked its floor where the cleaning robots had done their valiant beeping best. Only three chairs remained intact, and none of the tables. Someone had left an axe stuck in one of the bedraggled palm trees. A chainsaw had dragged itself in laps around the floor, chewing up tile in long swooping lines, spattering blood in tiny droplets until its battery finally ran down. Four yellow plastic cones warned would-be pedestrians away from where the deck had been blasted and deformed by an explosion. The Miner suspected that they were someone’s idea of a joke.

  The warring factions had returned to their casino, hotel, and security station, respectively. There had been a tacit agreement not to attack each other while retrieving bodies, and with only the single sticking point of who would claim Mr Shine’s body – the Morlocks won that one, arriving in the galleria in a tightly-packed, well-armed mass of silent grim faces, and then melting away again after – the removal process had actually finished before the newcomer had wandered gawking through the carnage to the only restaurant in seven million kilometers. He’d sat down and asked for a menu, whereupon Takata had said, “I’ll make spaghetti. Ever had spaghetti? You’ll like it.” And then Takata had walked away.

  He was, in fact, enjoying the pasta in red sauce. He had a napkin tucked into the top of his jumpsuit, which the Miner had never seen anyone in real life do, and was relishing the food and the red wine, which Takata had served in a real glass.

  The Miner had not been offered spaghetti. She decided, against the vote of her growling stomach, not to provoke another bitter rant by asking for some. It had taken the statistically unlikely intrusion of an actual paying customer to stop the previous rants, but she wasn’t sure just how far under his placid and genial façade those rants still were, and her headache was finally starting to go away. First Takata had torn her head off for throwing a grenade in the galleria, like nobody had ever done that before. And for killing a bunch of security guards, and for killing a bunch of Angelica’s people, and for killing a bunch of Feeney’s people, and for getting Mr Shine killed, and just generally for causing mayhem. Then Herrera had come in and bitten her head off himself, first for not giving him warning so that he could video the fight, and then for being out of grenades. Then Takata had been mad that she had somehow put this idea into Herrera’s head, and she had been starting to think that she could just never win with these two, when this roly-poly peacemaker had wandered in looking dazed and hungry and easily-separated from his credits.

  “Everything’s wrong with this place,” Herrera was saying when the Miner tuned back into the conversation. “Starting with the people who run it, Anaconda.”

  “Hey!” The newcomer drew himself up in his seat and tried to look dignified. “I’ve been with Anaconda for fifteen years now.”

  The Miner turned in her seat, suddenly interested. “What is it that you do?”

  “Oh, I’m just a trucker. I don’t really care, I just feel like I ought to hoist the company flag, you know? I haul ore, mostly. I’m making a circuit of the Anaconda holdings picking up their buyings. I have to say, this station’s been slacking off.” He waggled a finger playfully. “Smallest haul of any place I’ve
been to this year. I mean, not bad. I don’t want to insult anyone. Some good quality nickel-iron, you know.”

  She smiled tightly. “You don’t say. When are you moving on?”

  “Oh, pretty soon. The robots are loading up the hold, but it won’t take long. I was going to stay over in that hotel up there and maybe have myself a real shower, but it looks a little... um... busy.”

  The Miner nodded, couldn’t think of a reply, and kept her mouth shut. The trucker happily swirled another forkful of spaghetti, ate it, and said with his mouth half-full, “I was supposed to pick up a passenger, too, but the guy who contacted me went quiet.”

  “Let me guess. Guy name of McMasters wanted you to pick up a female passenger?”

  He gave her an owl-eyed look. “I... Yeah! How’d you know about it?”

  “Lucky guess,” she said. “I don’t suppose he paid in advance?”

  He shook his head, chewing. “He paid a deposit. Said she’d pay the balance once we were underway. Mmm. I’m Khalid, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

  “Call me Mickey,” the Miner said, after Takata and Herrera introduced themselves and glared at her for being rude.

  “Hah, like the mouse? Hah!”

  “Yeah. Like the mouse.”

  If he minded the conversation being over, he didn’t show it. He returned to his pasta with gusto and drank the wine like it was water. Which, thought the Miner, it could have been.

  “What the hell?” came Takata’s voice from the kitchen. The Miner stood and drew her pistol, the automatic she’d taken off the guard, ignoring the trucker’s eyes bugging out at her. Mary came through the curtain, pushing it aside like it was heavy, and apologizing quietly.

  “Hey,” she said, ignoring Takata. “Got a minute, in private?” Her voice was subdued and she looked haggard. “Back here, not out there.”

  Takata threw up his hands at the invasion. “Other people get rats in their kitchens, I got gangsters.” Neither Mary nor the Miner paid him any attention as they walked to the back of the prep area and took stools.

  “I’m not good at asking for help,” Mary said, staring down at her hands. “So I’m not gonna. But I have to get out of here, Mick, and I have to be even with McMasters before I do.”

  The Miner nodded. “One condition. I have to know what happened to your brother.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know for sure. When the fighting got bad, Granddad tricked him into getting onto the yacht. It went away and hasn’t docked since. He’s not on the station, that’s all I know: the... thing... in his chest has a tracking tag in it, and McMasters has a way of detecting if it gets close to the station. I think sensors look for the radiation signature.”

  The Miner absorbed that, and relaxed. “All right.”

  “I, uh, I don’t have any money of my own.”

  “That complicates things.”

  Mary winced. “Yeah. Look. My grandfather keeps a tight fist on the cash. I don’t want him knowing I’m leaving until I’m gone.”

  “That definitely complicates things.”

  She looked up at the Miner, defiant. “You afraid of complicated?”

  “No, I’m afraid of picking up the tab.”

  REPORT

  Feeney looked up with hooded eyes as Corbell quietly entered the room. The old man looked ancient, frazzled. He clutched a glass of whiskey in one hand, half full, and in the other held a photograph. Corbell didn’t need to look at it to know the one: it was a still shot of Feeney, Mary, Wilfred, Angelica, Raj, Mr Shine. The station master, a guy named Herrera. The company rep, a woman named Tou. Two other people whose muttered names had been followed by “dead”. All dapper, all grinning. Some kind of charity thing, someone had said. He recognized that restaurant Mick hung out in, in the background, and the bartender smiling in the back. Feeney stood in the middle of the group, both hands resting on that silver-headed walking stick of his, looking satisfied with his position on top of the world.

  “Angelica took the water reclamation,” Corbell said without being invited to report. “We held the air cyclers, and convinced Shine’s people in hydroponics and vats to see our way.”

  Feeney scowled and put the still face-down on the desk.

  “Two out of three isn’t bad,” Corbell said.

  “Two out of three is shite!” Feeney threw the glass at his head. “Two out of three is me expending twice as many resources I don’t have on guard duty than she is, while she can still cut off our fecking water! And what bloody use are the air cyclers, I’d like to know. We can’t cut her off; she just needs to open her damn doors. We could fart at them maybe, is that your idea? It already stinks over there; it must if it’s anything like this rathole.”

  Corbell bit back a suggestion that they could put something a lot nastier than flatulence in the casino’s vents. There was such a thing as too far, and this was a man who’d gladly put a nuclear weapon in his hands.

  “I got word from Sparks that your yacht docked,” he said instead.

  Feeney stared at him, and he couldn’t read the old man’s expression. “The alarms didn’t go off? He… He’s not back?”

  “I don’t know. She just said to say it docked. It tried the mechanic bay that got blown up first, I guess, and went around to the other one where she is.”

  Feeney looked genuinely glad about that. “Well, I’ll be. How is the old girl? Still bitter about her toys getting broken?”

  “She didn’t say.” She did, actually: she’d reminded him that Feeney had promised her a great deal of money to make up for a long list of things she’d been able to readily tick off from the top of her head. No sense reminding him again; he’d just fly off the handle, and Corbell didn’t owe her putting up with another rant.

  “Well! Well, well, well. That’s fine. How’s Mary, by the way?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “She hasn’t been helping?”

  “Her, um, her husband just died.”

  Feeney tsked. “Stroke of luck. The del Rios, they’re rotten, my boy. Can you imagine Angelica del Rio as a sister-in-law? Can you?” He hooted, warming to his subject. “That woman’s more venomous than a dozen vipers, and meaner besides. She said she’d turn over the reins, but don’t you believe it. That brother of hers was weak-willed. A flash young fellow, sure, and not a bad sort really, but not very strong up here. She’d have been trying to run things behind the scenes.”

  Corbell kept a straight face, and said nothing. Feeney didn’t seem to notice. He accepted Corbell’s presence, maybe was grateful for it. Anything was possible.

  “What about that snake McMasters? Has he shown his face yet?”

  “No, sir. Word is, he’s not very popular right now.”

  Feeney snorted. “When has he ever been?”

  “I mean,” Corbell said carefully, as the informant had multiple times drawn lines of comparison to the old man, “that he’s not popular with his own crew. He’s been telling them that shooting the sniper was an accident, that he was aiming for Angelica, but they don’t all believe it.”

  “Nor,” Feeney said, “should they.”

  Corbell stood silent while the old man brooded. He’d stopped overthinking his position there, really tried to avoid thinking at all. All the old worries, was he doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, overstaying his welcome, listening to conversations he shouldn’t. That all seemed silly.

  “You’ve been a good boy, Corbell,” Feeney said idly, looking at that photo again instead of at him. “I see that and by God I appreciate it. You’ll see, I don’t forget my friends.”

  Corbell only nodded. Anything was possible.

  GETTING EVEN

  The three security goons openly gaped at the Miner when she walked in the front door of their station. They hadn’t seen her through the windows because those were now mostly covered with steel blast shutters. They hadn’t seen her through the cameras because someone had run by and spray painted them again. So, a surprise was unsurprising, but thi
s particular one was unexpected. She kept her useless right hand on her sword, which hung from that hip instead of the usual side, but didn’t make a move to draw it. She looked patiently from face to face, not saying a word, until one of them marked himself as having above-average intelligence by saying “um”.

  The Miner turned to Mr Um. She hadn’t recognized him with his pants on. “Relax, I’m not here to torture anyone. I want to talk to McMasters.”

  The guards hesitated, tense and waiting, then all three got up at once and made for the back room. First they nearly collided with each other, then they nearly collided with McMasters himself.

  “You,” he said.

  “Me,” she admitted.

  “What do you want?”

  “Fifty thousand credits and my rifle should do it. I might think up other demands later; depends how nice you are to me.”

  “Fifty… Are you out of your mind?”

  “People keep asking me that.”

  “Why do you think I’d give you fifty thousand credits?”

  “And my rifle. The fifty thousand, because you’re a lousy shot. The rifle, because it’s mine and you might hurt yourself with it.”

  “What do you mean, lousy–” He stopped abruptly and stared. Fear crept into his features. He turned to one of his goons. “Stand guard out here, we’ll talk in my office.”

  The Miner smiled. “Figured it out, did you? I like it out here, and I don’t care if they hear me.”

  “I said, we’ll talk in my office.”

  “And I said I like it out here. I like my odds better.” The black-suited goons looked between her and McMasters with ugly expressions. McMasters didn’t press it, and the Miner went on: “I know where Angelica’s keeping her, and I know she hasn’t talked yet. Clock’s ticking, though.”