Tiyamike ran through the Undercity, mask on and knives out. Down two flights of stairs, across an open street with slime-soaked floors and dripping ceilings and then into a little nook on the far side that should, if Tiyamike was far luckier than she deserved, place her in front of the assholes who'd attacked Mohana's group.
Stupid, stupid, stupid mistakes. How could she have made so many stupid mistakes in one day? All she'd had to do was get one man from the spaceport to the Crystal Palace and she hadn't managed that with all her crew and Hasenkamp's to boot. Be surprised if Hasenkamp didn't put a needle through her brain after this was over.
She'd deserve it.
The mask hid her face, filtered the air, and kept anyone from gassing her. Necessary. Whoever it was had hired assassins and thugs from off-world to take Mohana Baumhauer down. Big man Mohana better be able to defend himself because bad things were coming and he was first on the line to die.
Be a pity. Tiyamike liked him. Didn't flirt much but then few people did. Saw her square jaw, raw cheekbones, and looked away. Which was good. Fewer people that really saw Tiyamike the safer she was when she had to go out on an op like this.
Well, not like this.
This wasn't an op. This was a disaster, a fiasco of galactic proportions as Bala would say. She had to be cursing up a storm up on the surface. But if Bala got him through to at least Hasenkamp then it would be all right. Maybe. Possibly. No guarantees of it, of course. If they could slip him the amnesia drug somehow then everyone was doomed. Tiyamike as much as Bala and Imani.
Bad for business, that's what this was. Bad for her jewelry business, bad for her assassination ring, bad for Hexal City and the whole of Melin. They had to get these assholes, shut them down, or everything Tiyamike had built in her life was going to come crashing down. And that wasn't going to happen. She wouldn't let it. After she'd quit training to be a Consort like Bala, Tiyamike had decided that she wouldn't let anyone or anything control her again.
Now to come find that she'd been controlled all along and some asshole from another world was moving her and everyone she knew around like a Go stone on a board where she couldn't see the lines? Not good. Not going to continue, either. Especially since Tiyamike'd failed with her one job of the day.
Wouldn't stay failed for much longer, though.
Echoes of running men, heavy with good boot tread that echoed like hammer blows on the floors. Outsiders then. No one who lived in the Undercity wore boots that made noise like that. Made you too easy to ambush, too easy to kill. Tiyamike breathed deep, relaxed herself as best she could and then moved just as the troop of goddamn outsiders in their heavy armor and ridiculously huge blasters ran past her.
Two down on the first swing, knives to the throat where the armor was weakest. Another went down when Tiyamike snapped their spine at the neck with a hard kick. Fourth was a kick to the groin in a weak armor spot with the toe spike on her boot, cutting the groin open and bleeding them out. Fifth died slower, Tiyamike grabbing his head and twisting until his spine snapped.
That was when the rest, only three left, started to react. Fast, strong, they came with blasters for a fight meant for hand to hand. Tiyamike killed one by shoving him into his buddy's range of fire, took the next with another knife to the throat and then knocked the blaster out of the last one's hands.
He fought. Hard. Fast, deadly enough for someone not born and bred to the Undercity. Didn't know the slime, how to slip and slide on it, how to fling it into your enemy's mask so that they couldn't breathe. He choked, tore the mask off, screamed as Tiyamike nailed him through the shoulder with her biggest knife.
"I yield!" the soldier, stupid man, shouted.
"Think this is a game, do you?" Tiyamike said. She jerked the knife in his shoulder and nodded when he screamed and clutched her hand. "No game, boyo. You talk or you dead. Target?"
"Mohana… Mohana Baumhauer," the soldier replied. Sweat poured down his face. His hand shook on Tiyamike's wrist. "Successful. Neutralized. Not killed."
"The drug," Tiyamike said, not really needing the confirmation. She looked up and growled that there were more heavy loud bootsteps coming. Time to move. "Wiped his memory."
The soldier grinned, defiant despite his injury, Tiyamike's weight pressing down on him. "Done now. Nothing will get his mind back."
"Mmm, good you think so," Tiyamike said more to fuck with his mind than anything else. She snorted at the shocked, horrified look on his face and then tore the knife out only to slam it between his eyes.
Dead. Good. She stood, planning on leaving the bodies for scavengers or the next group of soldiers to strip. Boots were too close, almost there. Still. She grabbed the soldier's belt pouch, just in case, cutting it free and running with it just as the other soldiers arrived. Tiyamike heard the shout, hear blasters going off, but she was around a corner and sprinting through the Undercity as fast as she could so that no one would catch her.
And given that Tiyamike knew the place like the back of her meaty hand, she lost them quick.
Through one complex set of apartments two stories high constructed in a big cavern left over from the Settlement, down a flight of stairs, across two gushing rivers of slimy water from Hexal City overhead that'd probably kill an offworlder outright. Not Tiyamike. She'd upgraded until she could survive anything thrown at her. Only way to succeed as an assassin. Best way to get out of the Undercity.
She slowed in one narrow passage that was a perfect sound chamber, letting you hear every voice and footstep for a mile around if you stood in the right spots. Tiyamike walked slow, soft, her feet not making even a whisper of sound as she listened to people on Fourth floor and the black lift, prostitutes complaining about off world clients. Stiffed them, run out, left behind bits of metal and wire that were lovely little bombs. Prostitutes had defused them, sold them, laughing all the while at idiot offworlders.
Closer in, near the best lift back up to her shop, Tiyamike heard heavy boots and people with too-big blasters. Cutting her off from home. Good to know. Wouldn't last long down there, even with big blasters. The fumes there were lethal unless your lungs were modified in ways offworlders rarely did. And she could hear coughing already.
Bala's Crystal Palace, home of the Platinum Consort, most important consort on all of Melin? The paths leading to her no-long-secret escape passage were completely filled with more heavy boot offworlders. Not getting Mohana in there that way. Pity.
But, thankfully, the path she wanted up to the floor just under Hasenkamp's not at all secret medical facility, was clear. For now.
Tiyamike ran.
Her people should be fanning out even now, searching out the targets she knew were complicit in the never-ending riots that kept Bala and Imani from moving around freely. Taking out the people fighting to take control of the Consorts back from Hasenkamp. Had several heading out on various ships to kill people off Melin who were talking big about taking over the government just because they were having trouble right now.
Like Hexal City had ever been calm. Never had, not from the moment the generation ship had arrived and people had begun to tunnel into the cliff walls to build homes that weren't painfully exposed to the sky overhead. It was just another way to try and cut the Ceelen off at the knees since they were the ones succeeding best at fighting back against the forces trying to control them.
Tiyamike peeked around the corner to the secret entrance that Hasenkamp probably didn't want her to know about. All her people did, of course. They kept eyes on Hasenkamp. On his boys. Assassins and mobsters weren't natural enemies but they weren't natural allies, either. Four apparent bums sat curled around the entrance, a tiny alcohol heater with its blue flame between them and the wall so that they could get every bit of heat possible from it as they boiled water.
Except they wore boots, not rags, on their feet and the one hand she could see as one of the 'bums' checked the water was way too meaty for a true bum. That was someone who'd eaten real food in the last week or so, not someone surviving on expired food tablets and not enough of them to feed a child. A sick child.
Tiyamike breathed in, out, did one last check around to see if anyone else was there. None of her cybernetics gave her any sign there were cameras in the area. No listening devices either. And her sonar gave back no pings at all within a quarter mile. Safe enough.
"Ours!" one of the 'bums' snapped when Tiyamike strode over.
"Hasenkamp," Tiyamike replied. She smirked behind her mask when four systems attempted to hack her cybernetics. "Shut up. I need to see him now. Mohana's been hit with the amnesia drug."
"Shit," the one who'd spoken snarled as he rolled to his feet and shoved the secret door open. "Go!"
She went.
Up the ladder, crawled down the long passageway that wound around about three lifts, two stairs and then gradually sloped upwards until she was right underneath Hasenkamp's building a half mile away. Knees and wrists ached but that was the price to pay for using this particular entrance. She keyed in the entry code, smirking when she got it right because Hasenkamp was going to curse like the lily-pure offworlder he was when she opened the door, and then shoved her way through the floor into the middle of the medical bay.
"How did you get in there?" Hasenkamp roared, needlers pointing at Tiyamike's head.
"Did you really think it was a secret from me?" Tiyamike said as she shut the door again.
Bala and Imani were both there, along with the entirely attractive Mohana Baumhauer. Tall, dark skinned, with hair smoothed until it hung in perfect ringlets around his shoulders, the man's face was a monument to perfection: full lips, a wide nose, dark eyes just a hair too wide for beauty. He was drop dead gorgeous, as handsome a man as Tiyamike had ever seen and he stared at Tiyamike with such obvious puzzlement that she sighed.
"He was hit," Bala said.
"Offworlders said so before I killed them," Tiyamike agreed. "Damn it. Now what?"
She pulled off the mask, letting it roll up into a narrow cylinder that other people would probably think was nothing more than a stylus. Could be used that way, truthfully, and a lot of Tiyamike's people did when they needed to have their masks available for a sudden strike. At least it was easy to tuck away into her belt, out of the way until she needed to put it on again. Though she would need to clean it and herself soon.
"You're so beautiful," Mohana whispered, his voice full of awe and his cheeks warming to a glowing red as she snorted and stared at him. "You are. You're the most beautiful person I've ever seen."
"You definitely got your mind wiped," Tiyamike said, amused. "I ain't no beauty. Exact opposite of it, actually. So what's next? My people are moving but if he's wiped, we're screwed."
"We're trying to figure it out now," Hasenkamp said, shaking his head at Mohana's confused look. "We don't have a single clue of who they are and where they're coming from."
"Took a belt pouch off one of the soldiers," Tiyamike said, pulling it from her pocket. It wasn't too nasty with slime and runoff but it was bad enough that Bala held her hands up and then prevented Imani from taking it. "I'll get clean and we can go over it. Any way to purge his system?"
"It's already taken effect," Bala said. "There's an off chance that his nanites will restore the connections in his brain but that's all."
The sheer grimness in her eyes was the worst Tiyamike had seen since the day Tiyamike abandoned her courtesan training and left Bala alone to endure the beatings, rape and torturous lectures for hours until you collapsed in exhaustion. Tiyamike sighed. Great. Bad enough that Bala looked defeated. Hasenkamp wasn't meeting anyone's eyes, the big man wringing his hands and fidgeting like a thundercloud about to burst and Imani had hugged herself, eyes glistening.
"If they got cameras on their soldiers," Tiyamike said as she headed for the showers, "we might be able to lure them out. I implied to the one I questioned that we might have a cure for the drug. Soldier looked real shocked, horrified. So we could play bait, draw them out by running. Something to consider as I get cleaned up. Might not have the answer but there's more than one way to kill these bastards. We just got to keep going."
Seemed to be the right words because Bala's despair faded away into a wickedly delighted grin, Imani gasped and clapped her hands while giggling and Hasenkamp boomed a laugh that filled the silent, empty medical bay with its pristine beds. Only one who seemed to take it seriously was Mohana who frowned, head tilted to the right as he studied Tiyamike.
"I… would be willing," Mohana said. "Especially if I got more time with you."
This time it was Tiyamike's cheeks that went red because having a man like that look at her that way wasn't something she was used to. Tiyamike nodded once and then hurried for the showers. Best to get clean quick so they could decide what to do next. And if she used that shower to make sure that her hormones didn't make it hard to walk because of her erection, well, that was just common sense. Wasn't like she had a hope in hell of landing a man like Mohana Baumhauer.
Fragments of a Chain is now available at all major retailers in ebook and TPB format.