Red Noise

by John P. Murphy

  Then, amazingly, a million years later, the door opened. “You Corbell?”

  WE ALL FALL DOWN

  There weren’t many video feeds left in the security station, but the few there were showed Feeney’s gang running loose through the station. Panicked calls came in from the remaining Morlocks belowdecks about his soldiers banging on doors and demanding to search their homes. Angelica’s gang stayed holed up in their casino, content to let Feeney’s rage burn itself out. After hours of rampage, the calls stopped coming in. The video feeds showed empty corridors. They partly raised the outside shutter, just enough to see out, and the galleria was empty.

  Only six security personnel were left, and they all remembered the Miner. They had only been slightly relieved when she put up her hands and said, “I’m turning myself in.”

  Corbell they hadn’t recognized, which was probably for the best. They’d found a uniform for him, and the Miner was pleased to see that he’d ducked into the back and put it on. Doc Mills arrived at the back door, summoned by someone – the Miner never found out who. He examined her while her eyes were still glued to the feeds.

  When the violence subsided, the Miner turned to the six cops. They were all in uniform still, looking tired but determined. To her surprise, they had not all predated McMasters; one of them was the fake Rommel, even, Fergus something. Everyone else, they said, had shed the uniforms and either gone to hide out or join one of the sides.

  The Miner surveyed them, and Corbell. “It’s going to be a bumpy few days,” she said, “but their leaders are exhausted and their sides are in disarray. We’ll need to call back anyone who’s willing to come. I know a lot of Shine’s people went to ground instead of joining sides, and they’re armed. We can beat those two.”

  “Not you,” Mills said. “You’re in no shape to fight. If you try to exert yourself, those combat implants of yours will tear you apart.”

  “Turn them off,” she said. “Everything except the pain regulators.”

  He tried to do it, but after twenty minutes he had to admit failure. “The control module’s damaged and in emergency mode. It’s all or nothing.”

  She allowed herself a single, quiet sigh. “Turn them all off, then.”

  He did.

  The dulled pain didn’t all come back at once. It grew, starting at her hands and legs. Her right hand burned where she hadn’t been careful of the broken bone. The knee she’d injured in the galleria blazed. Pain radiated up her arms, caught her in the ribs. She’d been punched in the stomach repeatedly and damn could she feel that now. The electrical burns on her neck, the repeated blows to the face. It all came rolling back over her.

  They watched as she struggled to master it. As she breathed deeply and clenched her jaw. She opened her mouth to speak, stopped herself to be sure, and then repeated, “It’s going to be a bumpy few days.”

  The nervous chuckle around the room stopped suddenly. One of the cops, an older woman with a scar parting her hair, went to the window and peered out. “Something’s up,” she said.

  “Angelica!” Feeney’s crew had come out of the hotel en masse. They stood quietly and grimly, with only Feeney’s voice with its megaphone behind them. “Come out of there, traitor! Give me back my granddaughter!”

  The casino doors opened, and yellow-white smoke emptied out. Angelica’s fighters poured out with it, clutching cloths to their mouths and coughing.

  “Angelica! Get out here!”

  Her fighters stumbled, dazed. Angelica herself, doubled over with coughing and wheezing, scrambled out of the front doors. Behind her, the dice rolled snake eyes.

  “Where’s Mary, goddamn you?” Feeney’s voice boomed.

  “I don’t have her!” Angelica held a pistol in one hand like she didn’t know why it was there. “She left the station!”

  “Lies!”

  The crowd around Feeney had parted, and the Miner finally saw the old man and what he was wearing: an old combat carrier suit, mechanical-assist legs and arms and a bulletproof apron. And she saw what he was carrying, why he needed the suit: an eight-barreled black minigun, trailing a long belt of ammunition. The Miner paled.

  “I swear to God, John, I don’t have her!”

  “Yes you do!” He fumbled the megaphone and dropped it, leaving his own reedy voice above the din. “I know you do! Give her to me, you viper!”

  “I don’t have her!”

  “Bring me my granddaughter! And bring me that snake Mickey Mouse!”

  The entire galleria fell silent, and in that silence the lone stifled snicker echoed. Someone else laughed, and it spread.

  Feeney screamed incoherent rage, and the minigun roared.

  The wall of lead sounded like the monsoon. It smothered every other sound, drowning out the casino windows exploding in glittering shards and smoke, smothered the screams of the wounded and dying as they fell in a red mist. Feeney swiveled as the belts swept smoothly though the machine, and the palm trees jerked and spasmed as he edged too close; bark and splinters flew.

  Angelica had taken the full brunt of the spray, falling backwards and squeezing off a single shot to ricochet off the dome. She fell and lay still in a spreading pool of crimson. All around her, bodyguards and fighters and stooges fell dead or dove in vain for cover.

  The thunderous static suddenly cut out, and the Miner heard spent shell casings spilled to the ground like poured from a bucket.

  Feeney’s chest heaved and he dropped the minigun, its barrels ruddy with heat. Half sobbing, half screaming, he tried to take a step in the tangled mechanical suit and fell to his knees.

  “I beat you!” he screamed. “I beat you, you witch, you traitor! I beat you all! Give me Mary! Give me my granddaughter, you snakes!” Behind him, stunned and clutching their ears, his gang stared at the carnage and the broken and screeching old man. They stumbled to part once more for a tall, thin man with a top hat and a black tailcoat, whose bared chest bore a giant tumor-like lump that blinked blue and red through his stretched-thin skin.

  The tall man stopped behind Feeney, who raised himself up and drew in breath for another shriek of rage. And then Nuke drew his pistol and shot his grandfather in the back of the head.

  PEACE

  “You might as well go,” Takata said. The bar around him bristled with dirtied glasses from the morning’s drinking, which he wasn’t bothering to clean. Herrera snored softly in his corner booth with his cheek mashed against the table and an empty glass clutched in outstretched hand. Corbell, still in uniform, was curled up on the bench across from him. “The government evac ships are on their way, and some nicer private ones for anyone who can afford them. You’ve still got your ship, at least. You can probably make a pretty tidy profit if you’ve got a couple berths to let out.”

  The Miner stared dully at the steel shutters, which Takata had dropped for some privacy and security. The six remaining guards had evaporated after the massacre, and she didn’t blame them. She, Mills, and Corbell had made as much of a dash as they could to the lower decks, and Mills’ clinic. Every step had been agony. He’d patched her up then, bandaged her wounds, taped her injured joints, but given her nothing for the pain, nothing that might make her dopey. She’d been tensed for a fight or for flight, watched and listened for hours, in shifts with the kid. But the pursuit never came. Corbell, his last nerve finally frayed, had made some discreet calls to someone he thought would be sympathetic, and the response was simple and devastating: Nuke didn’t care about her. The criminal king of Station 35 was feeling generous in victory, and she just wasn’t a threat.

  Still, she and Corbell had come up the long way, and in the back door, and if anyone had spotted them, they hadn’t cared either. And then he and Herrera had gotten very drunk, and the Miner had found a sitting position that didn’t hurt much. The pain was receding on its own. Outside, reveling goons drank, smoked up, and had fist fights in the galleria. Someone was singing who had no business trying. Nobody had cleaned up the bodies and blood of Angeli
ca and her slain gang, nobody had even moved the old man. The two foes faced each other down in death, and hours on, the stink seeped under the shutters.

  “Military’s coming in,” Takata said like he was talking about the weather. “They’ll blockade the place. Either make that tick come out, or starve him out. Anaconda’s gonna get a black eye over this, you’d better believe it.”

  She didn’t look at him. “What’ll you do?”

  He was quiet long enough that she wondered if he heard her. Then he said, “It’s funny. That kid you made security chief said something to me a little while ago while I was trying to figure that out. He told me, ‘you pick your pain’.” He fell silent again. “Herrera has to stay until the military comes. He could quit, but he won’t. So… I’m going to stay with him. Turns out I kinda like the old buzzard. Maybe we get a week together. Maybe longer, I don’t know. But that’s what I’m picking.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It was a good try,” he said. “This is Feeney’s fault, really. I don’t know where Nuke was hiding out, though, that’s what gets me.”

  Orbiting on Feeney’s yacht, was what they told Corbell. Loaded up with booze, drugs, and playthings, waiting for the all-clear from the old man or for that battery to run out. A few months of going from station to station to find his reputation preceded him, then months in orbit around Station 35, brooding and nursing grudges in solitude. Then that nuclear blast had messed up the alarm sensors. It was all he needed. The joke was on him, though – an hour after he boarded the station, Sparks and a bunch of the Morlocks had stolen the yacht and fled.

  “Mmm,” said the Miner.

  “I’m just saying, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  She turned slowly in her seat to look Takata in the eye. “You really want to help?”

  He looked hurt. “Of course I do.”

  “Then find me a bottle of good whiskey.”

  His face went dark. “That’s how I can help? Oblivion? To hell with that. You don’t want to be drunk.”

  “I want a bottle of good whiskey. Can you get me that or not?”

  “Yeah, I can get you that.” His annoyance had turned to anger. “Five hundred credits, you want whiskey so bad.”

  DRUNKEN LULLABY

  The Miner tried to walk straight, but it wasn’t working out for her. The stairs up to the Hotel Astra had been treacherous, but she’d made it without splashing too much of the remaining whiskey. Five hundred credit whiskey was nothing to spill. She held the bottle in her good left hand, which was fine, it was everything else that was a little unsteady.

  Fighters saw her and some of them cheered and some of them spat at her. They all looked some combination of drunk and uneasy. There was a nervous giddiness in the air. But they pretty much left her alone and continued with their own partying, letting her waltz right into the Astra lobby.

  The lobby was a disaster. The couches lay on the floor, legs broken. The lights were all either flickering or out, and every flat surface had someone’s tag on it. A couple people were passed out, or maybe dead, on the floor. Three motley-looking drunks seemed to be trying to have sex off behind the registration desk, but kept saying “ow!” and “watch it!”.

  She went for Feeney’s office and banged on the door. “I know you’re in there! Lemme in!” She banged some more until her hand hurt, and then got bored of pounding and started kicking, and the door opened.

  Nuke loomed. The Miner wasn’t short, but he was a head taller than her, leaving her to stare into that blinking lump of skin right at chin level.

  “You,” he said, sounding amused. He rubbed his stubbly chin and studied her. “You’re drunk.”

  “No I’m not,” she said.

  “Yes you are. What do you want?”

  “I want to come in, why do you think I was knocking?”

  He stepped back from the door, still looking amused but keeping a wary eye on her. He swept out an arm to gesture at the room, causing his shabby tailcoat to come open and leave the giant ugly lump on his chest exposed. The Miner could see his ribs behind it, could see the huge scars and skin stretched horribly thin over a familiar dark gray lump with three lights blinking red and blue. “Be my guest.”

  She stumbled into the room and took in the mess. Feeney had trashed it pretty well in his anger, but had still left all the furniture in place and intact, and hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be cleaned up. Now it was a trash heap. The desk was shoved over to one side, its corner smashed through the glass over a shelf. The top shelves were pulled down from the walls, their books and cases and clocks heaped on the floor. A big stained mattress had been dragged into the middle of the room and was strewn with a tangle of sheets, clothing, and underwear. The Miner’s sword stood propped against the window, surrounded by hacked-up chairs and disemboweled pillows, and a few spots of blood.

  “I’m redecorating,” Nuke said, watching her. “What do you want?”

  The Miner gave him a knowing look. “I bet you’re wondering what I want.”

  He blinked, and then laughed. He had a nice laugh, she thought. Easy and natural. “Christ, lady, you are drunk.”

  “Good stuff,” she said, noticing the bottle in her hand. “Here, have some. I want to butter you up anyway.” She grabbed a glass on the second try and succeeded in sloshing some whiskey into it. Then she took another and sloshed more into it.

  He watched her drink from her glass, then took a sip of his. “Damn, that is good stuff. So.”

  “What do you want?” they both said at once, and laughed.

  “I want a job,” the Miner said.

  “As what, whiskey disposal?”

  “No, I–” She frowned. “Is that a thing?”

  “Jesus.” He took a long drink and gave a little cough. “I can’t believe Granddad paid you ten grand.”

  “Underpaid at ten,” she groused. “You gotta understand, I am really, really, really good at killing people.”

  “That good, huh?”

  He sat in his grandfather’s chair, a long easy arrangement of limbs, and he set the glass on the corner of the desk where she obligingly splashed more whiskey in. Then she pulled up a chair that still had duct tape on the arms. She sat in that and poured herself some more.

  “Listen,” she said. “I once cleared the crew of an entire enemy ship by myself in hand-to-hand combat.” She stopped and sipped her whiskey. Nuke, showing some interest now, took a swig himself. “I stuck myself to the side of a recording buoy with magnets. Out there in space, nothing for millions of clicks. I stuck to the side for eighteen hours until they came by to pull it in. Because they only scanned for explosives, see? Why would they scan for people, that would be nuts, right?”

  “That would be nuts,” he agreed. He tossed back the rest of his drink, and she refilled it, talking.

  “So they pulled it in and I peeled myself off it and told it I’d call.” He barked a laugh. “And I got out my sword and I murdered every last one of those motherfuckers. Then I stole their ship, and I brought it back so we could put our own motherfuckers on it who could pretend to be the original motherfuckers and get into their space station and murder all those motherfuckers.”

  Nuke leaned in, interested. “What happened?”

  “They got blown up. Friendly fire, someone on our side didn’t get the memo, can you believe that? I aced all those...” She waved her hand, searching for the word.

  “Motherfuckers?” Nuke offered.

  She pointed at him, and finished, “all for nothing.”

  He snorted, and sat back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “All for nothing,” he said, then went quiet. “There was this one time. Me and my buddies went to rob some lawyer on the lower level. We weren’t broke, just bored. Raj thought it’d be fun. This was the good old days. We did it ninja-style. Kept it pitch dark, got the override code from security – this was back before that guy… McMasters? I don’t know, I never met the asshole – we got the code and went in. Easy, right? Like ninjas.�
�� He punctuated his story with a long drink. “Except for Ditz. Ditz had dropped a metric fuckton of acid and didn’t tell nobody. And the lawyer, guess what? The lawyer had a dog. Who the fuck has a dog on a space station? So the dog starts barking, right? And Ditz just totally loses his shit and starts screaming about angels coming for him, and the stupid sonofabitch starts shooting. Pow, pow, pow!” He acted it out swiveling in his chair in wild circles. The Miner refilled his drink. “It’s a goddamn shooting gallery in there, so me, I say fuck that noise, I make for the door. Only, we kept it dark. Ninja-style. And I picked the wrong fucking door.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit! And what’s on the other side? The fucking lawyer, completely bugged out, with a fucking baseball bat! Shit, I didn’t care about that, I just said, ‘Get down, idiot, that moron’s high as a kite and armed to the teeth,’ and we ducked behind the bed and waited it out. Long story short, two guys got drilled, and the guys who survived beat that fucker down when he ran out of ammo and started wailing about otters. But me, hiding out with that lawyer? I got laid!”

  The Miner laughed.

  “Robbed the moron blind on the way out, too, so bonus.” He drained his glass and slammed it down.

  “Shit,” the Miner said, drawing the word out. “You’re exactly the son of a bitch I want to work for.”

  “Eh,” he said, and yawned. “I don’t got any fucking money, that’s the problem. I could pay in drugs, but no cash. Granddad spent it all, you...” He yawned again, opening his mouth wide like a lion. “You believe that shit?”

  “No,” she said. “Come on, that’s bullshit. He was loaded.”

  “Yeah, it’s bullshit, but it’s true bullshit. This place is a dump and there’s no money. And shit, all my old pals are dead, and we’re almost out of the booze and drugs, even. And fucking Sparks stole my yacht.” He shook his head. “But fuck all that. I’d rather be top dog in a shit heap like this than somebody’s good little soldier out there. I’d rather, I’d rather...” He frowned and noticed he’d been sliding in his chair. “That’s some strong fucking whiskey.”