The tables and chairs of the galleria sat under the sun lamps strong enough that the Miner wondered if Angelica was waiting for high noon. A number of tables were knocked over or broken, and smashed chair parts decorated the aisles. Bloodstains marked furniture and deck alike, and even the trees had been splashed. Takata had lowered his shutters. Herrera was still asleep, anyway; he’d miss the fun.
Feeney had seen the Miner and insisted that she stick around. She maybe could have objected, maybe forcefully, but she was tired and her hand hurt and she liked the view from up above. The rest of them had retreated inside the hotel, leaving her the sole human occupant of the galleria now that McMasters’ crew had withdrawn, rebuffed angrily by Feeney and Angelica both. The empty space stank of blood and ozone, and the only sound was the whir of the anti-projectile lasers.
Mr Shine emerged from one of the side spurs off the galleria, alone. The Miner hadn’t seen him leave; maybe he’d gone out through the service entrance. Smart move, it made him appear more independent. He projected confidence as he walked, slowly and deliberately. His sling was gone, but that arm seemed pretty firmly lodged with his thumb hooked in his red cummerbund. He strolled to the middle of the galleria, to the stage under the sad-looking palm trees. As power plays went, the Miner had to respect it. With McMasters under suspicion, he was setting himself up as the grown-up here, making sure everyone played nice. She felt like she was watching a coronation.
The casino doors rolled open and three columns of somber-looking fighters came out, armored with miscellaneous bits and mismatched helmets, carrying clubs and swords. The Miner recognized some of them as having been Feeney’s crew. Fickle bunch, she thought. Behind the fighters, looking defeated as she stared at her feet over tied hands, shuffled Mary Feeney. Angelica walked behind her, holding something to her back that was covered in a jacket. The Miner considered that a nice touch, paying a kind of homage to the firearms rule.
The entourage jerked to a halt at the foot of the steps up to the stage. Their grimy faces looked for the first time like real soldiers. Behind them, the dice rolled too many sixes.
Mr Shine nodded once to Angelica, then took his uninjured hand out of his pocket and gestured casually up at the hotel: come on.
Feeney fussed as he tried to assemble an honor guard of his own around the terrified bound sniper, who was still thrashing but kept on her feet. Eventually he managed a box formation, and the Miner heard him tell them to keep her on her feet until Mary was safe. The phalanx managed the stairs with a small amount of dignity, and slowly navigated the furniture-crowded aisle toward the center of the galleria.
Mr Shine held up his hand, and they came with ill grace to a halt. “All right,” he said, and his calm deep voice was loud enough he had to have arranged a mic. Again, the Miner was impressed with his sense of theatre. She wasn’t thrilled to replace Angelica and Feeney with this puffed-up king-in-waiting, but she felt the world owed Takata a bit of real peace.
If there was more to that sentence than “all right”, the Miner never heard it. Black-uniformed security officers poured out of the shuttered stores on both sides and surrounded the two groups. McMasters and ten more armored guards emerged from the security station. She couldn’t quite tell, but she was reasonably sure that McMasters had waxed his mustache for the occasion. He must have woken up the entire complement of station security for this. They were all armed with stun batons, but a few of them had sidearms, and McMasters himself carried a rifle – the Miner’s rifle, in fact.
“Surrender these two to me,” McMasters said loudly. “I’m the law here, and I’ll handle the criminals.”
Settles seemed to visibly relax, and stopped struggling.
All eyes shifted to Mr Shine, and he was frozen. The confident smile had turned into a rictus grin. He still had his left thumb hooked in his cummerbund, and the right hand was outstretched in a gesture of unclear intent. The king-in-waiting was apparently on standby. The various goons on all sides shuffled nervously, unsure what was going on or what would happen next. Angelica looking back and forth between Shine and McMasters. Feeney had come up beside the Miner and was clutching the railing white-knuckled. “What is that fool doing?” he whispered to himself. “Don’t let McMasters have them, Shine, you jackass! Say something!”
“The hell you will,” Angelica snarled, when Shine said nothing. “You’re just protecting your attack dog.”
The smirk on McMasters’ face was visible a mile away. “If you really thought that, Ms del Rio, you wouldn’t have taken the Feeney girl hostage. You still think Mr Feeney had your brother killed, hired that psychotic killer up there to do it, or we wouldn’t be out here. You’re probably right.” He raised the rifle a tad and chambered a round. His deputies hovered around him in a loose knot, probably terrified under their black helmets.
Mr Shine stood paralyzed. He started to say something, and stopped and stammered, and the microphone echoed his stammering. McMasters and Angelica eyeballed each other, ignoring him. Feeney’s goons guarding the sniper looked increasingly worried as security advanced on them.
The Miner never had much patience for standoffs, nor for indecision. She still had a pretty decent throwing arm despite all the years in low gravity, but of course the security people were well-armored against rocks and bottles, and had been pelted half-heartedly by both Feeney’s and Angelica’s crews in the past. They were used to it. So it took about a second for one of them to glance down at the object she’d thrown, and then another half second to complete a double-take and yell, “Grenade!”
The security team had time to scatter, and some of them even did. McMasters threw himself to the floor, where someone with more viciousness than sense gave him a swift kick before the explosion blew the scene into bedlam.
The armored security goons engaged with the fighters from both sides indiscriminately as more poured down the stairs from Feeney’s hotel and out from the casino. “Get Mary! Goddamn you bastards, get Mary!” Feeney howled, forgetting his megaphone and hanging halfway over the railing. He turned and saw the Miner and grabbed her jumpsuit in two handfuls. “Mick! I’ll give you ten thousand credits if you rescue her. I swear it to God Almighty, I will.”
There wasn’t a need, though: Mary had shaken loose of Angelica and was barreling through the crowd. Up past Mr Shine onto the dais, then down into Feeney’s crew. Bleeding and limping, she used her tied forearms as a shield as she caromed off tables and through a swarm of assholes eager for a fight.
Everyone froze at the crack of a rifle. Mary stumbled and fell over a table, then down to the deck. The Miner didn’t think before she vaulted the railing, and landed hard with her implant-assisted joints screaming. Her left leg exploded in pain, but she could still move it, and she dashed for Mary.
On the other side of the galleria, where she’d been thrashing and kicking at Angelica’s goons dragging her away, the sniper’s body spasmed, went slack, and fell. Angelica screamed frustration and fury, but her guards dragged her bodily away into the safety of the casino.
The screams and thuds and the crackles of stun batons were joined by gunshots and flashes from the anti-projectile lasers. Mr Shine stumbled, and went to his knees.
McMasters fumbled with the rifle again, turning toward where Mary had dived under a table, but instead used it as a bat to fend off a huge bare-chested fighter with stun knuckles on both fists. Somewhere, the Miner could have sworn she heard a chainsaw rev. McMasters fell back and hoarsely called the retreat, squeezing off one more shot into the crowd as he and his team fled the field. Confused, pissed off, and probably drunk, the crowd turned into an enthusiastically bloody mosh pit.
The Miner reached Mary, her knee screaming. She pulled the still-bound woman from under the table, and hauled her to her feet. Mary leaned on her hard enough that her spikes gouged the Miner’s neck and cheek and drew blood, but they were both so charged with adrenaline that they sprinted through the crowd anyway. Judging the stairs too hard to get to, the Miner steered them to a bench outside a shuttered VR joint, sheltered by the stairway and just beneath the anti-projectile lasers.
“I’m fucking done with this shit.” Mary heaved a sigh that could have been a sob or a laugh, then spat something out that looked like a tooth. “I am so done. So fucking done. And where...” She closed her eyes for a moment and her head bobbed a little. “Where the fuck did you get a grenade? Are you out of your mind?”
Then she ruined the Miner’s comeback by passing out.