“Rates?” Manuel said without hesitation.
Lucia answered, “Whatever the bounty is on Roland, we will pay you if you get us to the client. Roland suppressed a wince. His finances were in excellent shape these days, but they were not infinite.
“What would stop me from just trying to collect on the bounty then?”
“Nothing,” Roland grunted. “Nothing at all.”
Manuel gave him an appraising look, “Nothing except the very real possibility of suffering a 'misadventure’ of my own?”
“I don’t believe in telling people how to live,” Roland shrugged, “Or how to die.”
“How magnanimous,” Manuel smiled. “I’ll take the job if the bounty or the pay is more than fifty-k. I’ll get the client to come out of hiding, or at least expose himself in a manner we can exploit.”
“Done,” Lucia said quickly.
“Good,” Billy said. “Let’s go see if the boards have any bounties for our big ol’ teddy bear.”
“The aboves or the belows?” Manuel asked.
“So far they’ve all been belows,” Roland answered. There was a confused look on Lucia’s face so he explained, “The 'above’ boards are for legitimate bounties like debts, criminals, military stuff. Hunts that can be exercised without legal issues.”
Lucia’s face cleared, “Ah. I get it. The ‘below’ boards are for bounties on people who can’t be hunted without running afoul of law enforcement? Like if you want a witness killed or something?”
“Exactly,” said McGinty. “Roland doesn’t have warrants anywhere or owe anyone any money, so hunting him means doing so outside of legal channels. Manny here is a complete scoundrel, so he won’t sweat that sort of thing.”
Manny smiled, “But I may need a sizable cash advance to do it,” his raised eyebrows feigned a sincerity his words did not express, “hard creds only, I presume? I will be operating on the below boards after all. Everything must be untraceable, right?”
“This plan is starting to suck less than I originally thought,” Billy conceded.
"The weak link," Manny winked at Lucia, “is undeniably, myself. You are all putting a lot of trust in me, considering how poorly we know each other.”
It was a test, Roland knew. Manuel was investigating to see if they were really trusting him or if they were setting him up. Roland approved of the caution and responded, “Billy vouched for you. Said you were reliable.”
“Did he?” Manny looked over at Billy with a raised eyebrow, “I did not think we knew each other so well, Billy.”
“What can I say? I am an excellent judge of character. I trusted that big goon, didn’t I?” he threw a brusque gesture Roland’s way. “Look how that turned out.”
“I guess I’ll just have to try to be worthy of your high esteem, then Billy,” Manuel said, words dripping with sarcasm.
Billy nodded back, “Please do. Or you can double cross us and find out what happens to people who piss off Lucy and her pet psycho. We still can’t use Marko’s panic room yet. We haven’t found all the pieces of brain and skull and the stink is horrendous.”
Manuel raised his eyebrow again, and Roland realized this was a tic the man probably could not help. Billy went on painting the picture of what Roland was capable of, “Tore an eight-inch thick vault door off the hinges, ate a plasma bolt, then punched the fat fuck so hard his head exploded.”
This was not entirely true. Marko had never gotten a shot off with his plasma caster. Roland hoped he never had to try to absorb plasma fire as he didn't know if his armor was up for something like that. But the rest was a fairly accurate assessment of what had happened.
“I get it, Billy,” Manuel waved him off of divulging further details, “Roland is scary and pissing him off is a bad idea. I’ve been in this town less than four months and I already figured that out,” he gave Roland a measured look. “Everybody knows it.”
“Glad to see my reputation precedes me,” Roland replied evenly. He and Manny were very different creatures, but they had been forged in many of the same fires. Roland could respect that.
“I’ll get your guy, don’t worry. It’d be best if I proceeded alone from here, though. Billy, you should probably fabricate a falling-out between us to make it more believable that I’d go after Roland half-cocked.”
“Nice touch, yeah,” Billy smirked, “good idea. Lucy, Roland, go on and leave. Manny and I will stay here and choreograph a big ol’ shouting match and he’ll storm out.”
“Then, now unemployed, I shall be forced to return to my lodge to take a job. If there is one up for Roland, I’ll sign on for it.”
“Good,” Lucia said as she stood, “Do it fast, though. I don’t want the grievance to go out until after you have the job. I’ll tell Steve and Mindy to stall for another hour or two.”
“Perfect,” Billy agreed. “Now get out of here and look grouchy while you do it,” he looked at the cyborg. “That means your regular face, Roland.”
“Eat a dick, McGinty,” Roland responded affably.
“There’s the face we need,” Lucia laughed at Roland’s scowl.
The two then left, Lucia stalking with stiff gait and her face locked in a vicious snarl. Roland looked like he always looked, which is to say like someone had pissed in his oatmeal that morning.
About thirty minutes later, Manuel Richardson left Billy’s office with a torrent of shouted expletives and a furious slam of the door terminal. Billy shouted after him, and the two screamed at each other in a very public and dramatic fashion while Manuel stormed out. More than one set of prying eyes and ears took note of this, and one of those skulked off to a quiet corner of the compound to make a surreptitious comm call. The prying eyes and ears in question belonged to a lowly runner, a delivery boy prone to dipping into the narcotic contents of his packages. Deep in the thrall of his growing addiction, the need for blaze now drove him to sell interesting tidbits of information to whoever had a few extra creds to drop on them. Bloodshot eyes flicked nervously at his screen. Whatever had gone on in the office had to be important, and the runner knew somebody would be willing to pay for that information. With his call completed, the trembling informant then checked his bank balance to ensure his dirt had been paid for. When the numbers appeared on his tiny screen, he smiled the sad, elated smile of a junkie who was about to get high. Then he hurried off in the direction of the closest vape den.
The courier, a man called Milton, did not know his transgression had not gone unnoticed. Like most addicts when a fix was within his grasp, Milton forgot about everything else around him. He did not encrypt his call because he could not afford a quality comm, and he did not wait for a safe period of time to elapse before making it because he had a serious jones going. Milton needed a blaze fix, and he needed it now. The gaunt addict was blithely unaware that he had just been conned, and he remained unaware that his indiscretion would cost him his life. But he knew he was going to get high, and this was all he cared about.
Billy McGinty had run this hustle a hundred times a hundred different ways. The only reliable thing in his business was the unreliability of addicts, so Billy had learned to use it to his advantage. When he sat back down to his desk, it was with a smug grin on his lean face. He pulled up his terminal and requested all the signal logs for the previous ten minutes, and in short order found the call just made by the not-so-bright informant.
“Alas, poor Milton,” Billy whispered with a sad smile, “We hardly knew ye.”
CHAPTER NINE
After the grievance was filed with the Hunter’s Lodge, the bounties dried up completely. Manny had managed to secure one for sixty-thousand credits before the Lodge burned the client and wiped the boards, which was exactly what they had wanted.
Manny skulked in the Quinzy Lodge lounge, nursing a glass of vodka and watching hunters come and go. It was a quiet place, as far as lounges went, and the conversations of bounty hunters and assassins were rarely of a sort others would find interesting. Mercenary bars we
re often loud with the boisterous boasts of hardened fighters, and thieves’ dens bustled with excitable chatter as groups planned or discussed their latest big heist. Hunter’s bars were different. They were quiet and dark. Conversations were low and cryptic. People did not smile in the easy friendly manner of rival tradesmen, but rather they smirked and grinned like predators with an easy meal in sight. It reminded Manny far too much of factional assemblies on Venus, where various groups of partisans would get together to pool resources or plan larger operations. Nobody trusted or liked anyone else, and it was hard to have a real conversation when everyone was trying to sit with their backs to the wall.
Manny had never liked bounty hunting, and had only turned to it as a way of getting off Venus. An eight-year-old boy when the last of the fighting over the Venusian secession had ended, he grew up among the broken remnants of the Separatist armies that had refused to surrender or honor the peace. He had been trained as a guerrilla fighter and scout for as long as he could remember. Now, with the distracting influence of cheap booze dulling the edges of his normally perfect focus, he found himself thinking about the first time he had been handed a slug-gun. He remembered how heavy it had felt in his too-small hands, and how strange it seemed for a child to hold so dangerous a thing. He recalled with crystal clarity how terrifying the report and recoil were when he fired it for the first time. It had bruised his shoulder and he almost dropped it. His weakness had shamed him to shedding a child’s tears in front of the men he worshiped.
With his parents dead, Manuel had grown to love his squad and crew as the kin he could never have. Those rough men and women who had fled to the bowels of the great colony domes and transfer stations dotting the inhospitable surface of Venus were his mother, father, and siblings. The government called them terrorists, but he had called them family.
This made their eventual betrayal all the more awful. He was far too young to understand, they had said. He wasn’t ready for the truth. As if somehow the truth of what they were would become more palatable with age or experience. ‘Hard choices,’ they had explained. ‘This is the only way’ they had exhorted.
At seventeen years old, Manny decided that if the atrocities he had inadvertently taken part in were the ‘only way’ to ensure a free Venus, then he was no longer interested in the cause. Overnight, Manuel Richardson suddenly found himself without a home or a family. He was a enemy to both factions and an outcast. He was friendless, homeless, and lost in a world where everybody wanted him dead. But he was also a survivor, and so he escaped. For several years he roamed the Gate Stations, taking odd bounty jobs or smuggling gigs. He never stayed in any one place long enough to get found out or make friends, but when he heard that the Big Woo gangs were forming their own territory, he recognized it as a chance to start over.
Which is why he was now in a place he did not like, sipping a drink he did not like, working for a man he did not like. There was a lot to not like about this job, but Manny had never seen sixty-thousand credits in one place before and he was eager to find out what that looked like. Ergo, he continued to pretend to drink and he waited. He waited for a very long time. He was seriously considering getting up and leaving when someone came through the door of the lounge and met his eyes. The man was tall, spare, and nervous-looking. He had sandy hair and frightened eyes. His gait was shuffling and clumsy as he walked over to Manny’s table clutching a courier bag.
“My cousin said you like cats,” the scared man blurted the nonsensical callsign.
“They taste like chicken,” Manny gave the countersign and the tall man's tense face relaxed. Trembling hands placed the bag on the table and he turned to leave.
“Wait,” Manny said. “I have a message.”
“I don’t do messages,” the man looked terrified, as Manuel knew he would be.
“He’ll need to know this,” he tried to say but the courier cut him off.
“I don’t do messages, you need to—”
“Listen shit-for-brains...” Manuel grabbed the terrified man by the nape of his neck and pulled his face to within an inch of his own. He growled, and the courier’s teeth clicked together as his mouth slammed shut, “I am giving you a goddamn message anyway. Take it to him or don’t. I don’t give a fuck. But if he doesn’t get this info he will be pissed and I will make sure he knows why. You following me?”
The head bobbed up and down, eyes bulging with fear.
“Good. Tell him that the mark knows, and that they are moving soon. He needs to go to ground while I take care of it.”
The courier’s eyes were blank, filled with terror and devoid of comprehension. Manuel waved him off, “Go, asshole. Tell him. Jesus, don’t just stand there! GO!”
The mousy courier turned on his heel and scurried to the exit with far too much speed for discretion. He disappeared through the portal and out into the New Boston night air.
Manuel sat back in his chair and sighed a long slow breath.
Run, rabbit, run, he thought. Lead us to your masters.
He waited a full five minutes before pulling out his DataPad and checking the signal. Sure enough, the courier had not noticed the small location transponder Manuel had placed on him when he grabbed the man, and the signal was clear and strong. It was too much to hope that the low-level runner would lead them directly to the client, but it was a foregone conclusion the courier would want to unload the message to someone who would know what to do with it as soon as possible.
The pretty lady and the giant fixer would pick up the trail now, but he needed to stay in the loop if this did not work. He had signed on to get the client, and he wasn’t getting paid until they did. However, he did have a courier bag filled with hard creds sitting right in front of him, and he was more than a little inclined to pocket those as a bonus. He looked at the bag, and then looked around the lounge. His eyes wandered back to the bag and his fingers moved of their own accord toward the clasp.
A slender hand closed over his and forced it not ungently down onto the table top. Manuel looked up, startled, and found himself staring down some of the most spectacular cleavage he had ever seen. He experienced a whole series of conflicting thoughts and emotions in that instant. They ranged from surprise at suddenly being grabbed, to hormonal delight at the astounding view arrayed before him, and then meandered to fear when he realized that the small hand over his was ridiculously strong.
He dragged his eyes away from the dazzling décolletage and met the gaze of his new table-mate. She was extremely pretty, with blinding blond hair and delightful blue eyes. Her mouth was curled in a sweet smile, but those eyes gave her intentions away as something far from friendly. Manuel decided he would much prefer to look down again, and so he did. He also tried to extract his hand, but he could not even make it wiggle, such was the grip of the tiny blond.
Her voice was high-pitched and squeaky. Her words delivered with a slight drawl and bubbly inflection, “No, no, Mr. Manny. You get paid when the job is done.”
Manuel stammered, “Y-yeah...I get that. Just uh, just checking it is all.”
She winked at him, which simultaneously made his heart race and started a cold sweat from the back of his neck, “I assumed as much, Manny. But we are just going to sit tight here for a minute while Lucy and iron-britches run down that nasty old courier. Can’t have the client thinking you were the one setting his boy up, right?”
“Right. Yeah. Okay. I guess they didn’t really trust me too much, huh? Not if you’re here.”
“Roland doesn’t really trust anyone except Lucia. Smart guys remember that. Dumb guys die. I’m Mindy, by the way.”
“Manuel,” he replied unnecessarily and shrugged, “Can I have my hand back now?”
“What?” the woman looked hurt. “You don’t want to hold my hand? You’ll give a girl a complex talking like that!”
Manuel was young and possessed of all the same deficiencies other young men experienced when interacting with attractive specimens of their preferred gender. Anyone
with functioning eyes could see that he was not immune to the ample charms of the little blond killer. But he had also grown up a hunted freedom fighter in a band of other hunted freedom fighters. Long practice had taught him about feminine wiles, and he understood that sex could be every bit a weapon as a grenade was.
Often a far more effective one, he thought. Thus, the young man learned early to determine when he was being sized up as a mate, and when he was being sized up as a meal. While the two could be difficult to distinguish from time to time, this was not one of those times. Manuel diverted as much mental energy as he had to quelling his youthful lusts and focused his reserves on not running afoul of his new partners.
“I would like nothing more than to hold your hand, Mindy, and let’s be honest, virtually any other part of you that you’d let me,” his eyes darted back to her chest, barely covered by her skintight blue jumpsuit, which was unzipped halfway to her navel. “But I don’t really think you came here to whisper sweet nothings into my ear.”
“No,” she agreed and released him, “I was here to back you up in case things went weird.”
“And to make sure I didn’t sell you out or run off with the money?”
“Hush your mouth and perish the thought!” She gasped with exaggerated horror, “A nice Venusian boy like you do that? Why, I can’t even imagine such a thing!”
Manuel tossed her a scowling head shake, “I’m no choir boy, Mindy. But I’m no thief, either.”
“I know you aren’t,” she shot him a pout, enjoying how her antics caused his body temperature to fluctuate. Being able to see into the infrared spectrum made manipulating boys far too easy and far too much fun. “But we’ll just set here a bit and have a few drinks. I expect we’ll get a call from Lucy and Robo-dork within the hour.”
“What’s the story with him, anyway?” Manuel switched gears.
“What do you want to know?” She responded with a shrug, “He’s ex-military. Cyborg. Some sort of top-secret program that I do not recommend you ever ask him about, by the way. I used to think Mack was the toughest sucker in the galaxy, but I’m not so sure about it anymore.”
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