“We hate those fuckers. Got it?”
“I got it.”
“Pour me a pint. Half and half.”
“Half and half?”
“Half beer, half malt whiskey.”
“How much is—?”
“Ah now, good fucking question, or it would be, if it weren’t so fucking dumb. ’Cause I am the only one stupid enough to drink that shit, and I don’t pay for drinks. Got it?”
“Got it.”
The band was tuning up.
I felt a strange prickle down my spine as the guitar began hurling out angry riffs.
“Who the fuck are youse?”
“New barman.”
“Name?”
“Tom.”
“Hello Tom. I’m Annie.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you have your name tattooed across your breasts, darling.”
“You staring at my tits?”
I sighed.
“Hi Annie.”
“This was my da’s place,” said Annie Grogan, proudly. She was sixteen years old and, Billy had told me, as cheeky as a bare arse.
“I know,” I said.
“Some bastard killed him,” Annie pointed out. “Gunned him down in cold blood. What kind of monster would do a thing like that eh?”
“He must have been some kind of fucking monster,” I agreed.
“I miss him, my da. I do.” Annie was pensive. Then she smiled. “But that’s all over and done with. We have to look to the future right?”
“Right.”
“Wrong.” Annie looked angry with me. “You’re not listening to me; you just agree with everything I say, because you think I’m just a silly girl; am I right?”
I thought about this one. “Of course not, I’d never do that, and yes, of course, you’re absolutely right,” I equivocated, and was surprised when Annie smiled.
“You really are a useless gobshite,” she advised me.
“I am that,” I agreed.
“Who the fuck are youse?”
“New barman.”
“I never hired you.”
“Your son did.”
“Why?”
“I’m cheap, and good-looking.”
“You know what this is?”
“It’s a knife, Mrs Grogan,” I said patiently.
“What kind of knife?”
“A nine-inch Macalister throwing knife with a serrated blade and a hardmetal tip sharp enough to cut through body armour, Mrs Grogan.”
“Catch.”
I caught it, but only just.
“Good reflexes.”
“Thank you, Mrs Grogan.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“The new barman.”
“You know who I am?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“My name is Hari Gilles.”
I knew him of course; he was thinner than ever, like a corpse reanimate. He still licked his lips constantly, and his eyes drifted as he spoke.
“What can I get you, Hari?”
“I’ll have what I usually have.”
“I don’t know what you usually have.”
“Ask the optics. Just whisper to them, ‘Hari’ and they’ll know,” he whispered, and grinned at his own humour.
“I thought you were in jail.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was in all the papers. They arrested you for owning the phantom hospital and killing a Galactic Police Officer. Your trial’s coming up in a month; the papers all expect you to be found guilty and get the death sentence,” I said, comprehensively.
“Ah, well that’s all true enough,” said Hari, mildly. “But I bought my freedom, see? It cost me, but what’s money for, if not to allow a man to live outside the law? And now the kids on the street think I’m a hero, for killing a cyborg Cop.”
“I hate those bastard cyborgs,” I said.
“We all do,” said Hari.
I turned away.
I wasn’t of course surprised that Hari had bought his way out of jail. That kind of corruption was typical of this planet.
Even so it disgusted me. It made me feel – it made me feel –
It made me feel nothing. This planet was corrupt; I could hardly be surprised at what Hari had done.
It was a mistake on his part though.
For now Hari was back on my list; he had to die.
In just two weeks, I became a capable and popular barman. I was charming, efficient, never forgot an order, never overcharged. And was always fair about who I served first.
And, as I was fully aware, I was also hellishly good-looking, with a knack for getting beautiful women to fall in love with me. My technique was never to flirt or flatter or exude smarm. Instead, I teased and taunted all the beautiful women I met, and treated all the less beautiful women just the same. I listened to these women’s secrets, and told them home truths with a cheery insouciance. I mocked their clothes sense, and gave them advice on how to stop falling for evil gobshite men who always broke their feckin’ hearts.
And my approach worked – as I knew it would, from my centuries of experience of working undercover as a human being – every time.
Furthermore, I could catch a knife that was heading swiftly for my eyeball in mid-flight. A useful talent, if you worked in Grogan’s Saloon and Casino.
The saloon bar itself was circular and I was adept at serving customers from every direction without getting in a muddle. Every night the bar was packed, the clientele was drunk, but the atmosphere was always good-natured.
I soon formed a hypothesis: people enjoyed coming to this pub. They enjoyed drinking to excess, and talking bollocks, and arguing over nothing. They even enjoyed telling each other lies – often competing to see who could tell the most absurd and over-the-top story of incompetence, or derring-do, or bravado.
After accessing my dictionary download, I succeeded in finding a two-word compound noun that described the strange blend of storytelling and camaraderie that these humans seemed to experience within the confines of Grogan’s Saloon.
That two-word compound noun was: the Crack.
“Straight demon shot, with blues, double, juiced, chilled,” said a good-looking, voluptuous woman who was, I noted, wearing a dress so tight it looked as if it had been engineered to shrink on contact with bare flesh. She was Sergeant Aretha Jones and she looked, I also noted, quite different when she wasn’t in uniform.
“You got it.”
“You’re new here.”
“I am.”
“I’m Aretha.”
“Hi Aretha.”
“Hell, you’re good.”
I had her drink poured, stirred, mixed with juice and chilled in a few scant seconds. There were three other bar staff working in the same cramped space, but I managed to never get in anyone’s way.
I noticed that the skin around Aretha’s jaw was a different colour; the only evidence of a six-week-old skin graft. Her speech was unaffected; the bullet that had blown apart her jaw had left no lasting traces.
“What’s your name?”
“Tom.”
“Hi Tom.”
The next order came; I served my customers. And as I served, I checked my database. It told me that Sergeant Aretha Jones was loosely related to the Grogans – her stepfather Maxim was a cousin of Dooley Grogan’s. And Maxim had been, until his violent death, a gangster who often worked for Fernando Gracias. I further noted that this was data which Version 44 had already accessed. And her mother Jara used to work in a nightclub that was owned by Fernando Gracias, which is where she’d met Maxim: my previous Version had been aware of this too. But now, I probed deeper in my database and found a 160-year-old newspaper gossip column that suggested that Fernando Gracias and Jara had briefly been lovers.
Was Aretha herself the illegitimate offspring off that evil gangster?
My database checked the DNA of both parties, and the evidence
refuted that assumption.
But it still stank. Aretha was a divisional cop; she had no business being the daughter of a woman who worked for gangsters. Nor, indeed, should she be drinking cocktails in a gangster bar.
According to what I had read in Version 44’s contemporaneous mission log, Sergeant Jones was a non-corrupt and capable officer, who could be relied upon in a crisis, and should be treated as a close ally.
But I found this hard to credit. It seemed to me a further indication that Version 44 had been too credulous, and lacking in investigative rigour.
On the basis of my sceptical critique of the mission logs, I concluded that Sergeant Aretha Jones was almost certainly lacklustre and dishonest. And I marvelled that 44 had failed to reach this same conclusion. Instead, he had noted that Aretha was a “hero,” simply because she had sustained injuries in the course of the arrest of Sandro Barumi. But being shot does not of itself constitute heroism.
I resolved not to trust her.
Furthermore, I concluded, though this wasn’t strictly relevant to my mission, her choice of dress tonight was unfortunate in that it was garishly bright, and had too many revealing gaps, and in summary made her look – the mot juste was supplied as always by my database – sluttish.
I continued to serve, and to plan and strategise. As I did so, I registered that the band were playing another rip-roaring heavy-metal rage-lament. The guitar’s keening wail echoed.
And I had a strange sensation, eerily reminiscent of the emotion known as déjà vu.
I’d heard this song before. I was sure of it. But my database held no record of it.
I found myself humming the tune under my breath. Dum ti da, dum ti da, dah dah dah dum. Dum ti da, dum ti dah, dah dah dah dum.
I couldn’t, to my annoyance, get it out of my head.
The party was over. The birthday had been celebrated – Billy’s kid brother Jimmi Grogan was twenty-one today. Jimmi was drunk and pie-eyed and sentimental, wrapped in the arms of a freckly blonde girl. His sister Annie glared at him and at the freckly blonde girl in his arms, and the tattoo on Annie’s bosom glowed pink with emotion.
I carried two bottles of Golgothan malt whiskey over to the snug. Billy was with his older brother Jack Grogan, his uncle Martin Grogan, his mother Sheila Grogan, and Hari Gilles.
“Join us,” said Billy.
I looked at Hari, and recalled his appalling crimes, and I toyed with the idea of shooting him dead on the spot. However, my infiltration strategy did not allow for such reckless acts of vengeance. Instead, I smiled.
“I’m just bar staff,” I protested.
“We’re looking for capable men; join us,” Billy insisted. “Unless you think you’re too fucking good for us.”
“I know I’m too fucking good for you!” I replied, quick as a flash.
“That’s my man. Sit.”
I sat.
Hari Gilles smiled, warmly. “You’re a fine figure of a man, aren’t you?”
“Are you fucking flirting with me?” I marvelled.
“Always worth a try,” Hari said, and smiled again. He’d had his face newly re-tattooed with a gold halo effect, and it made his thin beautiful features seem strangely vulnerable.
“Ignore him,” said Billy.
“I’m ignoring you,” I told Hari.
“We may have a job for you. Are you interested?”
“I already have a job.”
“A real job. Danger. Violence. Gold.”
“Gold?”
“We’re planning a gold robbery,” Hari explained softly.
“It’s a heist,” Billy said.
“I might be interested,” I conceded.
“Are you an undercover cop?” Jimmi asked, and I laughed.
“Fuck off kid.”
“There are no undercover cops,” Billy explained. “The cops all work for me; I know ’em all.”
“They all work for you?” I queried.
“I pay the city police bills. It’s a deal I have. In return they – well, there is no ‘in return’. I own the police force; it’s one of my ventures.”
“Ah.”
“The heist.”
“Tell me more.”
Billy explained the deal. A consignment of gold was being transported across the city to a ranch in the west of the planet. Billy and his men aimed to hijack it and ransom it back.
“Why?” I asked.
“How do you mean, why?”
“Why? You earn a fortune from this bar. Why risk it all for a heist?”
“Hell, it’s what we do,” Billy said.
“It’s just the way business is done, in these parts,” Sheila Grogan pointed out.
I smiled at her, and put a twinkle in my eyes. She was attractively middle-aged – barely four hundred years old – and she was, I had already discerned, susceptible to the charm of young, ruthless, sexually desirable men, such as I appeared to be.
“How come?” I asked.
“You see, Tom, this is the way of it,” she explained. “The ranchers pay no taxes, and that can’t be right can it, so every few weeks we steal from them, money or goods or drugs or gold or whatever it might be, and pay a tithe to the Mayor. It’s what keeps the city going.”
“You pay a tithe to the Mayor?”
“Tithe, bribe, taxes, it all amounts to the same thing.”
“And the ranchers know you do this?”
“They know someone does it. But they don’t dare fight us. And we let fifty per cent of their deliveries through. We’re not greedy.”
I hadn’t known any of this. Billy owned the police force; the Mayor’s wages were paid out of the proceeds of armed robbery. I’d known the planet was corrupt, but this beggared belief.
“And what happens when they elect a President?”
“Nothing much will change. The ranchers are a law unto themselves. They won’t vote, they won’t heed the President’s Edicts. So we’ll keep hitting them, and the city will keep getting its money, and so everyone’ll be happy, except for the occasional trucker who we have to shoot true-dead. And, indeed, doesn’t that just serve them right for fighting back?”
I marvelled at the imbecilic yet entirely coherent logic of this.
“How long have things been run this way?” I asked.
“For as long as I can remember,” said Sheila Grogan. “Which is another way of saying – always.”
We left at midnight. The sky was bright with stars.
It was a beautiful night, I mused. The air was cold and bracing. The twelve moons of Belladonna shone like – like –
My thought ebbed, for I could find no apt comparison.
And indeed, why should they be “like” anything else, I wondered?
There was, I resolved, no need for simile.
The twelve moons of Belladonna shone brightly. It was a clear night.
There were, I noted, many stars.
In all my trips to this planet, I had never been outside Lawless City. I’d viewed films of the other cities, and the countryside, and had of course always been aware that this was a wilderness planet. But as we flew over the high mountain ranges and endless grasslands, it occurred to me that this was the true Belladonna. The city was just a cage; here was the beauty and the grandeur of the planet.
Our flying car flew low, in stealth mode, through the night, and through the dawn, undetectable by radar or the eyeballs of police fighter pilots. We skimmed fields of green bathed red by the sun’s glow, and saw the grainy leather hides of the grazing cattle and bison and mammoths, as they grumpily awoke and began to graze.
After some hours of travelling, we reached the ranchlands. These ranches, by and large, were vast castles with moats, and turrets that stretched to the skies. And semi-sentient hounds patrolled their perimeters, blinking curiously up at the flying car as it swept past.
Then, as we cleared a mountain range, a staggering vista emerged: an antigrav lake that floated above a plain, and filled the eye with miles and miles of blu
e water in which swam fish and sharks and dolphins. The savannah at the fringes of the lake was grey with bleached bones, remnants of foolhardy creatures who had leaped beyond the end of their world and had fallen down to a dusty death on land.
“What a useless fucking folly,” muttered Billy Grogan, though I rather liked it.
And finally we reached the Mining Fields. Robot miners spent their days hewing gold and rubies and diamonds out of these rich rocks. An air train was being loaded with containers of valuable ore and jewels.
And the flying car swept down and our plasma cannons fired. Anti-aircraft guns automatically fired back, but the plasma blasts were absorbed by our forcefields. Bullets whistled through the air, but they bounced off the hardmetal chassis.
Then the flying car landed and we leaped out, firing shots, diving for cover, blasting robots to pieces. There were no human guards and these mining droids were poorly programmed for combat, and carried only the most basic of weapons. So the battle was short and sweet.
After an hour of pitched battle, the Gold Fields were littered with the dismembered remnants of the robot miners. Then the real work began, as we started to transfer the gold to Billy’s flying car.
“Too easy,” I murmured.
“Look around!” said Billy, gleefully. “Every piece of that mountain is crammed with gold. They can afford to lose some.”
“What would happen if they fought back? Sent mercenaries to attack you in the city?” I asked.
“Then we’ll kill the ranchers. We’ve done it before. They know not to fuck with us.”
The flying car soared back into the air.
Annie Grogan was sitting next to me. She winked.
“You’re a good shot,” she observed.
“Not bad,” I replied.
“You killed twelve robots with eleven bullets.”
“Not possible.”
“One shot passed through two robot bodies.”
I knew that of course.
“I guess I was lucky,” I said modestly.
“I guess you were.”
“How many did you kill?”
“Forty-two,” Annie said casually.
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