“Jane!” Feeney leaned over the stairway to loom above the small crowd. The newcomers had shuffled in full of anxious bravado and been introduced around. Looked like a half-dozen new fighters, bedraggled and lean from the long spaceflight. The dregs and leftovers of the grimiest stations, washed out of some navy or merchant fleet, or on the run. Bloodshot dark-ringed eyes full of cunning, fingers always straying toward weapons. The Miner had been sitting, bored, as the various goons, new and old, tried their best to impress each other with stories about their martial and sexual prowess on the one hand and pharmaceutical tolerance on the other. One grinning moron crowed that he’d saved up and was having a chainsaw printed.
Feeney located her and fixed his eyes down on her from the railing. “Lend me one of your expensive hands, won’t you? One of my generous supporters isn’t feeling so forthcoming. Whyn’t you take a couple of my new boys and girls and go put this gentleman in the giving mood?”
The Miner scratched her neck, feeling a weight in the pit of her stomach. “Who?”
“Man named Peder Finn, a few decks down. Does some distilling. He used to share his profits like a good little boy, and I always rewarded him with brisk business, very brisk. But lately, not a credit...”
Feeney’s smiling face had some tightness behind it, she thought. Angry at something. When she’d stared back at him long enough that he looked like he might say something, she nodded once to acknowledge the order.
That name rang a bell, and the association with booze clinched it. She’d liked Finn, but cover was cover. “You, you, you,” she said, pointing out three seedy, rough, and less-than toothy specimens, ones who’d been boasting about busting heads and robbing locals. She had no idea if they were new or not. “Can you beat someone up without killing him?”
They exchanged lazy amused looks. “Probably not,” the short pimply one said with a leer.
“Good enough.”
The Miner walked so fast they had to jump to keep up. She took the service exit into the back halls, then the back doors into the big circular corridor that Blue, Khan and the others had led her through. She wasn’t totally sure of the route, but she mumbled something about avoiding patrols, and that was apparently enough to bluff the three clowns into thinking she knew where she was going. Anyway, she had a map in her heads-up display now, and the roundabout route gave her time to think.
They grumbled about her decision to take an elevator down – Mary had drilled into them that they were ambush risks, and while she admired the tactical thinking, she was firm. “Anyone dumb enough to mess with the four of us, they’ll get what’s coming.” That seemed to mollify them. She wanted time to think and look, and from the back of the elevator she finally got a good view of her three companions.
The biggest and meanest of the three, the guy who’d boasted about being on the run for killing three people, carried a kind of mace-looking weapon that looked like it’d been printed from a medieval recreation catalogue. It had a fat four-sided metal head with sharpened corners. His bare arms had some serious muscle to them, but she thought he looked like a gym rat more than a fighter: strong, but slow.
The skinny nervous-looking one looked to be a knife-fighter, maybe even a good one. She was on some kind of stimulant, judging by the way her eyes darted, pupils narrowed to dots, and she couldn’t keep her long nimble fingers off her knives. She kept half-unsheathing them, showing a couple centimeters of scratched and pitted blade, then shoving them back in.
The last one, short and pimply, had a fire axe that reminded her of that punk of Angelica’s she’d had to kill. The axe wasn’t sharpened and it looked like it hadn’t been used, but he fingered its edge with a dreamy look, and she remembered he’d told a story of beating the shit out of a lawyer like it was the funniest thing in the world. The goons had cackled as he’d stumblingly relayed how he’d demanded “the password” off the poor jerk who tried to insist it was some kind of mistake.
Two slow fighters, she decided, with maybe some power behind them, and one quick one.
“Looking forward to a proper fight?” The Miner forced some cheer into her voice.
“Damn right,” said the mace-wielder. He spun the weapon in his hand so that the sharpened edges caught the wan industrial light. “All this tiptoeing around, not wanting to make waves around that security fucker who took my guns. Makes me puke.”
The other two made approving noises and offered sage observations such as “fuck that guy”, and the Miner nodded. They’d all been on edge, and she could tell her own presence keyed them up worse. The elevator lurched as it halted, making her drop into a crouch, and the doors shuddered open. She tried not to think about how long it had been since it’d seen any kind of maintenance, even before the fighting started. Of course, anything that put it out of commission would knock out gravity too, she was pretty sure. Probably. She ushered her crew out quickly.
The heads-up map showed a couple twists to the corridor, with Finn’s compartment taking up a good chunk of reconfigured space well ahead. They walked for a minute before the Miner raised her hand and brought the company to a halt. It was a good spot, without sight lines in most directions thanks to those twists in the corridor and a strangely built-out living compartment. No hatches in sight. They’d passed a few security cameras, most obviously defunct, but there weren’t any in view here.
“Something seems off,” she said. They looked at her with naked apprehension. She pointed to the guy with the axe. “I don’t like it. Go up ahead and check it out. Don’t run, don’t fight. Just walk out, look, and come right back. Go slow.”
He looked relieved when she said “don’t fight”, and when she finished her instruction he nodded sharply and turned the corner. With him gone, she visibly relaxed and turned to the guy with the mace. “That’s a hell of a weapon,” she said. “While we’re waiting, you mind if I take a swing?”
He grinned broadly, showing gaps and broken teeth and sharing some impressively bad breath. “If you think you can lift it.” He hefted it one-handed and she dutifully gave it a dubious look. She eyed it up and down, to his evident amusement.
“Hold this,” she told the knife fighter, who had to quickly put her knives away in order to take the Miner’s sheathed sword with the clasp locked. Freed of that, the Miner made a show of stretching both hands and accepted the mace. It was heavy enough as it was, but she exaggerated its heft and the two goons laughed as she let it almost hit the deck. She grinned good-naturedly, feeling familiar tightness and warmth in her elbows, wrists, and shoulders as her augments gave her a little extra strength. Not much, just a notice that they’d been engaged, a friendly warning that if she overdid it they’d tear her muscles, stretch her tendons, and snap her ligaments like forgotten dock tethers.
The mace’s owner chuckled as she visibly struggled to lift the weapon upright, and she showed her genuine appreciation for the craft that went into the weapon. It was newly printed, she saw, and well-balanced. She raised it unsteadily, then turned and smashed the knife fighter on the top of her head, bringing it down as hard as her augments could manage, then spun and slammed the butt of the weapon into its owner’s gut.
Tossing the mace, she pulled the knife from its scabbard on her thigh, and drove the blade into the man’s throat. They died with a clatter but no other noise, and she had to step back fast from the rapidly-spreading blood. She grabbed her sword back and after a moment plucked the mace one-handed from the path of the blood, marveling at the impressive dent it had put in the deck. Then she stood at the corner.
She waited, heart pounding and listening hard until she heard faint steps. When the punk turned the corner, she brained him too.
After taking a moment to breathe and collect herself, the Miner leaned over the blood to put the mace next to its owner’s hand, swapped out the knife in his neck for one off the knife-fighter’s jacket, then sprinted for the elevator. She hated to put herself in that contraption again, but it gave her a minute to examine herself, wipe some blood spatter from her face and hands, clean and sheathe the knife, and put on a properly bored expression. She got into her computer’s messaging system and dictated a few quick alterations. By then the doors opened and she needed to start walking.
She didn’t hurry back to the hotel despite the overwhelming urge to run. She tossed the bloodied cloth in a corner, checked that it hadn’t re-soiled her fingers. The rear doors opened for her and the couple of toughs hanging out there perked up but let her pass. She went straight through the still-milling crowd of toughs and soldiers awkwardly chatting each other up, to Feeney’s office. She knocked once and let herself in.
Feeney looked up from his desk, surprised and blinking.
“Well?” she said, sounding impatient. “What’s up?”
“I… Done already? By God, you do fast work–”
She frowned. “No, I’m not done. You called me back. What’s up?”
“I did no such thing.”
“‘Come back. Just you. Trouble. F.’” She read from her message screen. “It’s from you, or at least it says it is. You didn’t send it?”
He stood, wide-eyed and alarmed. “No!”
The Miner swore loudly and turned to run.