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Roland was not happy about surrendering their head start to Grimes, though he supposed there was nothing to do about it. The pogo plane would reach the Underworld hours before their transport, but Lucia assured him that DECO used their extra few days on the ground to prepare the terrain for both hunted and hunter. Still, he seethed. Riding in the cargo compartment with his team, Roland sat silent and morose. This alone was not all that strange, and he kept his frustration wrapped inside a cocoon of ironclad control the entire time. None of this fooled Lucia for a second.
“Relax,” she said, patting him on the thigh. “He’s only four hours in front, and DECO will have him jumping through hoops the second he touches down.”
Roland tried to take her advice, but his guts refused to unknot themselves. “Outside of the controlled areas, he’ll be free to engage DECO. He’s too good at this.”
“Are you worried about Jimmy’s people?”
“Yes. Grimes is a different kind of animal. Somebody is going to get hurt.” He shook his head and amended himself before she could reply. “Get killed.”
“They are professionals, Roland. Don’t underestimate them.”
“I’m not. It’s underestimating Grimes that makes me nervous.”
“You can’t control everything. You can’t fight every fight. You have to let others play their roles.”
“I know that.” He did not mean to sound so irritated. He tried to soften his tone. “He’s just dangerous, is all. Worse than Chico, Lucy. Chico was a great shooter but also an idiot. You know what I mean. Grimes is...”
Lucia tilted her head. “He’s not an idiot. He’s not some two-bit punk or uppity gangster. He’s also not a corporate raider or a pirate, either.”
“Exactly. This is a different animal. A more dangerous animal. Promise me you won’t try to take him yourself.”
The sudden shift drew a frown from Lucia. “Is that what has you worried?”
“Always. And it has nothing to do with my respect for your skill, Lucy.”
“But Grimes will not let me have a fair fight. I’m not stupid, Roland. I’ve had my brush with death, and believe me, I will not be underestimating Grimes. When the time comes to take him down?” She tapped a finger to her temple. “This is the weapon I’m going to use. He won’t be getting a fair fight from me, either.”
“He doesn’t stand a chance, then.”
“What are we looking at when we hit the ground, Mindy?” Lucia asked.
“We’ll unload like everyone else. DECO will have someone meet us there and brief us on where Grimes went.”
“Unless he slips the net,” Manny added.
“And he might,” Lucia fired back. “Let’s not pretend he’s not that good. That’s where you come in, Mindy.”
Mindy replied with a toothy smile. “As long as they get me a track that ain’t too old, I’ll find him.”
“We won’t have any backup from Pike once we are on the ground,” Catrina said. “He can’t afford to be associated with anything too political, and that includes operations with DECO on foreign soil. Not without a contract, anyway.”
Roland asked, “Why not put him under contract then? Or why is this not covered by his previous contract? He ran with us on Prospectus.”
“Because his previous contract was a thin excuse for him to invade Prospectus and steal something,” replied Lucia. “If he helps us steal it again here, then there is no real way to deny he was never there to actually help the Prospectors. And Jimmy was never officially there. Right now, there is a full-scale DECO op in play with real risk of exposure. Pike could lose a lot of charters if DECO decides to show its hand.”
“Fine,” grumbled Roland. “I guess that’s a big deal, huh.”
Catrina answered, “A very big deal. I offered some Gateways assets, but Lucia did not want them.” Catrina sounded confused, and the edge in her voice made Roland suspect that this conversation was not over.
Lucia surprised him with her answer. “Catrina, we love you, but several million little robots in my brain are screaming at me not to trust Gateways. Maybe they’re wrong and it’s just my anxiety, but I’d feel better if this stayed a fixer job for now.”
Catrina’s tone took on a frosty chill. “You don’t think Gateways is playing straight with you? Do you think I am holding something back?”
“I don’t know, but I can promise you that Gateways has an angle here that is above your pay grade. When I figure it out, I’ll read you in and let you decide how to handle it.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t add up. Gateways is hurling resources at exotic technology they don’t actually need that badly, and they are going great distances to antagonize OmniCorp in the process. It’s not the stance of a wily megacorp. It looks like—and I hate to put it this way—mobster shit.”
“I’ve never been able to tell the difference myself,” Roland said. “But the posture is kind of aggressive for Gateways. They’ve always used me because I’m a cheap, low-risk alternative to actual action. Now I’m storming beaches on two separate planets just like the old days? Lucy is right. This smells bad.”
Manny placed a hand on Catrina’s shoulder. She looked at him and sighed. “Et tu, Manny?”
Manny’s sympathetic smile softened the blow. “I don’t know what Gateways is up to either, but OmniCorp and Venus go back a long way. I know OmniCorp, and Gateways does not need to attack them at all. OmniCorp lost on Venus, and losing The Brokerage decapitated their entire company. They are weak. Gateways doesn’t need to do a thing to win, and yet here we are in yet another reckless and aggressive field operation.”
“Gateways wants to take OmniCorp off the table,” Catrina argued. “Striking while the iron is hot.”
“Then all they’d have to do is gobble up the stock,” Lucia fired right back. “They can afford it, and they’d steal all that market share without a shot fired or a single charter at risk.”
Catrina was not done arguing. “That new gate tech might put OmniCorp back in play, though.”
Lucia shook her head. “I’ve memorized all the filings.” She tapped her head for emphasis. “I can read thousands of words a minute. OmniCorp has three quarters’ worth of operating capital at best. They could liquidate and extend that, of course. But they will need years to produce a viable product even with Prospector help. All Gateways has to do is stall them until they run out of money, or short the stock into oblivion.”
“Isn’t that exactly what we are doing?”
“Yes,” Roland said, pounding a fist into his palm. “But it’s the how of it that makes no fucking sense.”
Catrina slumped, comprehension pressing her shoulders downward. “Too aggressive. Too overt. There are a thousand ways to stall OmniCorp that don’t involve all this action and risk.”
“Exactly,” Lucia said. “Why rush things? Why risk lucrative charters in multiple systems? They’ve already won.”
Catrina, having accepted the truth in Lucia’s misgivings, switched gears. “Two probable reasons.”
Roland felt his eyebrows climb. Catrina’s shift from incredulity to active crisis management impressed him. She shrugged off her cognitive bias the way a child might drop a jacket on a hot day. He had to ask. “And those are?”
“OmniCorp has not lost. There is some other game afoot that is too secret to even tell me about. That’s my first guess.”
“And mine,” said Lucia. “And the other possibility?”
“Gateways is weak too. Weaker than they look.”
“Doubt it,” Lucia said. Their filings are strong. Stocks are up. Asset portfolio is enormous with low leverage and non-existent outstanding liabilities.”
“All of those are words I know,” Manny chimed in. The group looked at him. “I swear!”
“I recognize a few of them too,” Mindy said. “But they mean three-quarters of nothing to me. It sounds like OmniCorp is more dangerous now than the accounting makes it look, right?”
“That seems likely,” replied Lucia. “But the mystery is why Gateways is keeping secrets from us.”
“And me,” Catrina added. “Unless you think I’m in on it?”
“No,” Lucia said without hesitation. “I’ve been watching you, and you don’t fit into any of the plausible narratives. It serves Gateways better if you are in the dark.”
Catrina’s face twisted with what looked like anger. “You don’t think they trust me?”
“I don’t think they care one way or the other, Catrina. You are a number on a list that corresponds to a coefficient of risk in an actuarial table. I was a corporate VP once. Believe me. Gateways is keeping you out of the loop because they want you out of it.”
Catrina fell silent. Manny squeezed her shoulder again. She did not look at him but shook her head slowly. “I do... I do not like that.”
“That’s the job,” Roland said, perhaps too callous. “The Army did it to me. The Red Hats did it to Manny.”
“All of Gethsemane did it to me,” Mindy said, her voice uncharacteristically quiet. “We are all just tiny pieces in somebody else’s machine, kid.”
“Until we break out,” Manny said with an angry glare for Mindy. “And build our own machines.”
“That’s enough philosophy for today, folks,” Lucia said. “We are about to land.”
The landing pad at Gethsemane’s Underworld looked similar to a thousand other shabby landing pads in Roland’s estimation. His years spent policing colonial backwaters and storming pirate enclaves granted him vast experience in such things. The main areas wore a uniform layer of greasy dirt, stank of gear oil and ozone, and buzzed with a pervasive sense of frenzied disarray. Patches of dirty gray ice dotted the landing pads, betraying a bitter cold that Roland perceived as a sort of vague background sensory feedback. The walk from their transport to the interior lasted only a few minutes, though the less mechanical members of the team were shivering before they passed into the giant lift that would take them below the surface.
Inside, the smells intensified. The lift was large enough to move large vehicles, though for their ride other travelers took up all the free space. Human aromas mingled with a hydrocarbon effluvia so thick Roland tasted it in the back of his throat. Acidic compounds and solvent vapors stung his eyes, and Mindy looked like a coughing fit might overtake her at any point. Lucia and Catrina fared no better, with the corporate woman looking much the worse for wear. When the enormous elevator began its descent, Catrina’s complexion slowly drained of color before shifting to an unhealthy green. The motion of the lift and the awful air quality made for an unpleasant combination for the uninitiated. For himself, Roland often forgot about nausea. Like so many of the more unpleasant side-effects of human frailty, he was mostly immune to it. However, if he cast his memory back far enough, he could remember the unpleasant roiling of the guts and all the horrible things that came with it. He spared a moment of sympathy for Catrina.
This drove him to look over to Manny. As expected, Roland found the young man unperturbed by their unpleasant circumstances. The cramped lift probably felt exactly like the colony domes of Venus where he grew up. Roland wondered if Manny ever got homesick. He never got the chance to ask, because the lift ground to a halt. A sickening lurch accompanied by a tortured wail of strained metal announced their arrival at the bottom. Catrina suppressed a yelp and clamped a hand over her mouth. Manny threw her a concerned look. “You okay?” The woman nodded without speaking or moving her hand. Roland whispered a silent prayer for her constitution and dignity. The gods seemed to be on their side, because she did not throw up.
The mass of people spilled from the lift, and the group of Fixers moved with the flow out of necessity. As a group they paused once the tight flow of human current hit an open area where all could spread out. The space was not dark, though Roland supposed no one would ever call it bright, either. It looked like an equipment hangar, or a gargantuan industrial staging area that spread out before them all. The ceiling towered a hundred yards overhead, crisscrossed with maglev lines and gantries glowing the soft blue of gravitics on standby. Walkways striped the walls at regular intervals, providing access to hundreds of separate offices and vendors stacked as high as he could see. The glowing rectangles of their windows climbed the walls in flickering multi-hued ribbons. Ever the tactician, Roland noted four main exits marked by doorways large enough for heavy equipment. The largest of these, bright red and looming over their heads, had been inscribed with glowing letters as tall as a person. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” pulsed in angry orange neon across the metal expanse. Roland grunted a humorless laugh at the implications.
Lucia broke into his observations with a curt, “Where are we, Mindy?”
Roland gestured to the luminescent lettering and answered instead. “Gates of hell, boss.”
Mindy tilted her head. “He’s not wrong. Welcome to the Underworld, guys. This is where all the compulsive sinners on Gethsemane end up. We are in the atrium right now, but pretty much everyone passes through here at some point. Keep your eyes open for Inquisitors and Knights. They like to pretend they have jurisdiction here, but they really can’t do shit.”
“They have cops, but the crooks run this place and the cops know it.” Roland barked a hoarse laugh. “Hah! We’re back in Dockside, aren’t we?”
Mindy winked at the big cyborg. “Told you you’d like it here.”
“Where do we find our DECO contact?” Lucia asked. “I hope it’s not the same idiot from Port Piety.”
“I assume he will find us,” Mindy said. “In the meantime, I suppose we ought to get out of the open before Ironsides here causes a scene.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Roland said. “I’m just standing here.”
“The Underground is a tolerant place out of necessity, Ironsides. But you pissed off a captain of the Teutons yesterday. You’re already famous.”
“But I didn’t do anything to him!”
“Existing is enough, not bowing and scraping before his awesomeness only made it worse.”
Roland torqued his face into an effusive sneer. “Fuck this place.”
“With a rusty nail,” said Mindy.
“Guys?” Manny sounded reluctant to interrupt.
“What?” Roland snarled.
“I think we’ve caught the attention of a Knight.”
As one, the group turned to follow Manny’s pointing finger. The hulking figure of someone in red power armor stomped in their direction. Less ornate than the blue suit worn by Jericho, this version shared the gothic aesthetic and appeared no less intimidating for its lack of artistic excess. The helmeted head betrayed no expression, yet the length and force of each stride left no doubt as to the Knight’s intentions.
“Sword Brother,” Mindy hissed.
“Huh?” Roland replied.
“Fratre Militae,” she tried, butchering the pronunciation. “The most militant of the orders. Really just a bunch of bullies too stupid to pass the academic parts of Knight work.”
“Goons,” Roland said, relaxing.
“Goons,” Mindy replied.
“I can handle goons.” Roland failed to suppress the surge of joy he felt at what he knew must be coming.
Lucia heard it, too. “Roland...” She stopped, robbing the implied warning of any conviction.
“I know,” he replied. “I’ll be professional.” He locked his eyes on the approaching Knight, now only a few yards away.
Catrina’s voice sounded as if it might crack at any moment. “Professional? What does that mean in this situation?”
Manny unslung his green leather satchel and started to rummage around inside. His answer came with the confidence of experience and bore all the weight of cruel inevitability. “It means we’re fucked, Cat.”
Mindy sidled up to Roland’s left flank and cracked her neck. “Someone is, anyway.”