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The plan, if it could be called such, was simple enough.
Reinhardt filed his grievance that afternoon at the New Boston Hunter’s Lodge, and Mindy endorsed it. This caused quite a buzz, as many of the hunters present had been unaware such a bounty had even existed, and most found it laughable that anyone would go after Dockside’s most famous fixer for such a measly sum. It had only been six or seven months since the multi-million-credit bounty on Lucia had run so many promising hunters afoul of Roland, and the surviving Lodge members remembered with terrified clarity how poorly their guild had fared against the big man.
Reinhardt suffered mightily for the magnitude of his folly. His peers at the Lodge did not even bother to laugh at him, instead they just shook their heads in bewildered pity at his brazen stupidity. Reinhardt would have preferred to the mockery over the pity. One might laugh at the mistakes of an equal or perhaps a colleague, but one pitied a fool or a child. A quick check of the database indicated Wild Bill McClintock had filed a similar grievance when he returned to Wayfair. This was a welcome bit of corroboration and it eased Reinhardt’s embarrassment to know that someone else had been suckered as badly as he had. Wild Bill was no rookie, either. He had been around for a few years and should have known better. It was a small consolation, but it was a relief to be in good company all the same.
Reinhardt’s humiliation was irrelevant to Roland, but he needed the bounty hunter’s cooperation to track down the person posting the bounties on his head. Mindy’s endorsement helped because her stature escalated a minor procedural matter into a whirling cyclone of rumor-mongering and wild speculation amongst the Lodges. Sure enough, less than two hours after filing the grievance, Mindy’s comm chirped, and she received a summons to see the New Boston Lodge’s steward along with Reinhardt.
“Game’s afoot, kiddies,” Mindy announced when the call came through, “Time to set a trap!”
They were at the office again, essentially sitting on their hands and waiting until the storm of scuttlebutt had reached critical mass. Reinhardt had agreed to cooperate for no other reason than he had no other way of getting at the jerk who had set him up. Watching Mindy made the time fly by though. He could have happily observed her go through the motions of her day for hours without getting bored. It was mostly the motions of it keeping his attention. The tiny woman moved like an exotic dancer and she was not shy about it. Her prodigious chest always seemed to be no more than a millimeter from tearing free from the simple white shirt that she kept open most of the way to her belly button. The universe had had no love for Steven Reinhardt because it never did, but he watched like a hawk just in case. He was aware that Mindy had caught him looking, but he didn’t care. If Mindy didn’t want people to look at her tits, she could button her shirt, he figured. So, he did his level best to get an eyeful and didn’t worry too much about any issues she might have with it.
But the call from the steward arrived and ended their little game. Roland started barking orders.
“All right Reinhardt,” he boomed, “you’re up.”
Reinhardt scowled back, “yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what I’m doing.”
“If that was true, you’d have never taken the job,” Roland had still not let the hunter off the hook for trying to kill him.
“Settle down, boys,” Lucia interrupted the before a fight broke out, “We talked about this, Roland. Let it go.”
“Yeah, Roland,” Reinhardt sneered, “Let it go.”
Mindy sighed and kicked Reinhardt’s legs out from underneath him. The Bounty hunter crashed to the carpet with a floor-shaking thud, and Mindy had a long black blade against his throat faster than the eye could follow. To see the towering hunter brought low and subdued by the diminutive blond was comical enough that even Roland’s grouchy face twisted with suppressed laughter.
“Steven,” Mindy said, her voice even and patient, “Lucia and I have worked very hard to get Roland to a place where he doesn’t just kill everyone who pisses him off. He ain’t there yet, though, and you are not helping. If you keep waving your dick at him...” the knife rose a few inches away from his throat, and suddenly a crackling hum filled the room. Reinhardt felt a wave of intense heat from the blade and smelled the faint aroma of ozone.
“... I’m going to cut it off.” The blade whooshed over his face and sliced cleanly through the main column of a nearby office chair. The top of the chair toppled over sideways to land next to Reinhardt’s face. Smoke wafted from the severed stump, still attached to the base.
For the second time that day, Reinhardt made a mental note to learn when to shut his goddamn mouth. He had been staring at Mindy all afternoon and he had never even noticed she had an eighteen-inch dagger on her person, let alone one that cut through steel like it was cobwebs. He supposed if he had stopped trying to look down her shirt for a minute or two he might have noticed the weapon, but it was too late to correct that now.
“Reinhardt,” Roland snickered, “you really need to understand something. You are not out on some frontier station where some expensive body-mods make you kind of big deal. You are in the thickest, nastiest, deepest pond imaginable. I’ve put ten punks like you down before breakfast on a bad day. I could kill you while holding my morning mocha and not spill a drop. But if Mindy says we can use you,” he gave an affable shrug, “then you are useful. So make fun of me, act like a big man, whatever you want. As long as the mission gets completed, I don’t care. But if you have not grasped the severity of your circumstances by now then I won’t be responsible for what happens to you. My advice, Steve, is for you to stop worrying about Mindy’s boobs, your humiliating fuck-ups, or whether or not anyone will find out how scared you really are. None of it matters. Somebody tried to trick you into getting yourself killed today, boy. If you really want a crack at that guy, then you need to quit waving your dick around and get your fucking head in the game.”
Reinhardt sighed, “Fine. Sorry. It’s been a real shitty day. I’m a dick. Whatever. Let’s just do this.”
“Good boy,” Mindy quipped, and the dagger went silent.
Lucia looked bored, “We good, folks? All you bionic badasses finished beating each other up?”
“Yes, dear,” Roland nodded.
“Sure thing, Boss,” Mindy added.
“Whatever you say, lady,” Reinhardt grumbled as he rose.
“Good,” the brunette said, “Because this is the last time I’m going to hold Roland’s leash, Steve. Do your part and go away. Or, if you want another shot at him, take it. I don’t care. But do it after we are done.” She did not wait for his response because she did not care what it was. “Mindy and Steve, you go work the steward. Roland and I will go see Billy about exerting pressure from the other guilds.”
With that, the two teams split up and left the office. Steve and Mindy went for the Lodge over in The Sprawl while Roland and Lucia pinged for a ride to Big Woo. Getting an aerocar for Roland was always an interesting prospect. His weight meant the usual micro-sized driverless models were a non-starter. Even if he could cram his enormous bulk into the cabin, their undersized gravitic actuators could never generate enough antigravitons to overcome his mass. This meant he was usually stuck riding in the back of a cargo model and thus billed for both distance and freight weight. Lucia’s administration of his business affairs had done a remarkable job of reducing his financial woes, but money was money and he hated paying three to five times as much as other people for a damn cab ride.
True to form, the pair had to wait thirty minutes for a vehicle with sufficient power to respond. Roland sighed and took his customary position in the cargo area, grumbling all the while in response to Lucia’s good-natured ribbing over his bulk.
The car was barely large enough, and the tortured whine of strained gravitics sang a dirge of pain into Roland’s ears, promising an eventful ride to their destination. The car wobbled off the street and lurched reluctantly into the air with a few precarious swoops while the autopilot adjusted for his weight and inertial mass. It would only be a fifteen-minute ride to The Woo, but thirty seconds into the trip and Roland was already thankful for the nano-machines that prevented him from getting motion sickness. He could hear Lucia’s muffled protestations through the partition as the machine screamed and wailed its way to cruising altitude and pointed itself south and west. Roland was certain that there would be no tip for this ride. He smiled in the dark privacy of the cargo area at this.
What should have only taken fifteen minutes took twenty-five, because the poor misbegotten vehicle was never intended to haul retired military ordnance. When they arrived at the Umas compound in Big Woo, the car did not so much ‘land’ as it ‘collapsed’ onto the pad with a heave and a bang that rudely slammed the passengers into the floor. The big cyborg heard Lucia yelp in pain and surprise, and he exited the cargo compartment with impressive haste to check for injuries. Not that he was worried about Lucia, but rather it was the driver Roland was worried might need medical attention. If not from the landing, but from the ministrations of his irate passenger. True to his suspicions, it was all Roland could do to preempt a fight between Lucia and the disheveled man. He inserted himself between the sputtering diver and the hyperkinetic martial arts expert and threw the man some hard creds from his coat pocket.
Lucia did not normally have a particularly explosive temper, but the woman had been VP of Customer Engagement for a successful beverage company most of her career, and bad service could turn her into a real terror.
And they say I’m a monster, he thought to himself. But I’ve never killed anyone because they gouged me on a cab ride!
“Get out of here quick. I can only hold her back for so long.”
It was an absurd statement. Lucia could probably fit inside his coat without leaving a lump, but placing himself between the furious woman and the aggressively cursing driver bought enough time for both to settle down some.
Lucia threw a last rude gesture at the driver which she punctuated with a string of profanity so vile and creative it made Roland, a veteran of close to a hundred special operations missions and as hard a man as the galaxy had ever seen, question his own existence. Having known her father for a long time, he understood where the normally urbane and collected Lucia got her occasional outbursts from. Still, it was always rather jarring to hear the small, attractive woman suddenly explode with grotesque suggestions about the parentage of some unlucky bastard, or perhaps invite them to engage in improbably imaginative sex acts that would almost certainly be fatal if attempted by human persons. It would be funny if not for the terrible ferocity and apparent sincerity of these exhortations as she delivered them. He also found it charming because he was very much enamored of Lucia and he found most of what she did charming.
She permitted him to guide her away from the driver who was now close to weeping at the utter rhetorical destruction he had just endured, and the pair resumed their journey across the landing pad where the lanky red-headed figure of Billy McGinty awaited them. Billy was clapping slowly and shaking his head, “Holy tap-dancing hell, Lucy. I have heard whores from Galapagos cuss out a john so bad I needed a bath afterward. I’ll tell you something, those gals would have retired to a convent after hearing that screed,” his eyes were alight with mirth, “Jesus wept, lady! Do you kiss your cyborg with that mouth?”
“He deserved it,” Lucia seemed unperturbed, “damn near crashed and wanted to bill us for the damage. He knew the weight before he took the fare. It’s not my fault he doesn’t take care of his ride.”
“Yeah, but I’m still not sure how his mother’s potential relations with Cygnarian slime eels factored into that. And how do you know if he even has a sister? Let alone one that does...” he shuddered at the unvarnished horror of her accusation, “... that.”
“I knew a whore from the Czernobog station who did... that,” Roland began, then decided not to tell the story when he saw the look on Lucia’s face.
“Christ, aren’t you two just a pair?” He waved them over, “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
The headquarters of the Center Street Teamsters was much changed from their previous visits. The influx of revenue following Big Woo’s successful revolt against Combine leadership had gone a long way to improving the old Umas compound. What had once been the former Boss’s fortress of domination was now a thriving and bustling distribution center for all manner of contraband. Roland experienced deep unease at seeing all the drugs, weapons, and other illicit trade items being handled with such casual indifference, but there was little risk in consolidating the shipping aspects of so much rampant illegality here. Big Woo’s governing selectmen were still mostly corrupt stooges for various business and criminal enterprises, and the whole economy of this borough relied upon the drugs and smuggling. Those few pathetic laws Big Woo actually had against such things were enforced with only cursory attention to detail, and certainly not in any way that would hurt the flow of goods and credits.
Most of the more cumbersome criminal enterprises that relied on New Boston for customers and revenue hid in the Woo for safety from the more stringent laws and less corruptible constabularies patrolling Uptown and the Sprawl. Even Dockside technically had police, even if they were mostly useless. After Roland killed Marko, the Combine Boss who ran the dirty slum like his own private kingdom, Billy had reorganized all the various gangs, drug labs, smugglers, gun-runners, and manhunters into a series of guilds. Everyone except the slavers, of course. Those Billy had killed and subsequently shipped their bodies back to all the brothels employing them with a sternly worded note about ethical sourcing of trade goods. The boxes were not large.
Instead of structuring the rackets like a single business, he assembled them into trade organizations and established a free trade zone in Big Woo. The only difference between his free trade zone and a legitimate one was that his dealt in illegal goods and services. But now the market drove prices, not the whims of The Combine, and this had changed the economic landscape significantly for the poor downtrodden denizens of Big Woo. Billy had made it clear that like Dockside, there would be no Bosses in Big Woo, but the inevitable result of his leadership role in the revolt, and his position as the proprietor of the most productive drug labs in the area meant that everyone respected and looked to him for guidance. When the guilds met for their monthly meetings, it was Billy who chaired them.
They met in Billy’s office, on the fifth floor of a boring gray central administration building. Billy sat down behind an old wooden desk and Lucia found a chair across from it. Roland, as usual, had to stand. Most of the furniture he encountered on a day-to-day basis would never be able to handle his weight. This was just something he had gotten used to over the years. His joints never ached and he could not really get ‘tired’ in the classical sense, so it did not amount to much of an inconvenience. Billy started with a big grin for Roland, “Just who the hell did you piss off this week, buddy?”
Roland snorted, “Working on finding out. Thought you might be able to help.”
Lucia interjected, “Somebody is tricking low-level hitters into taking a crack at Roland. Last guy tried it for sixty-five thousand.”
Billy let loose with an explosive guffaw, “Sixty-five? To take a swing at this grouchy bastard?” He wiped his watery eyes on a sleeve, “Oh man! Who was it? Some frontier twit with a bionic arm or something?”
“Guy had a decent set of body-mods, but no hardware.” Roland smirked, “I didn’t even kill him.”
“You didn’t kill him? You going soft on me?”
“I’m growing as a person,” Roland’s voice betrayed no sarcasm. “Plus, we needed him to flush out the client. He filed a grievance with the Lodge. Mindy took him over there now so they could meet with the steward.”
Billy nodded, “Makes sense. Mindy’s word will carry a lot of weight with the steward. What do you want me to do?”
Lucia had a grand repertoire of weaponized smiles. These were all dazzling and warm and generally charmed any poor sap who found himself on the receiving end of one. Roland freely admitted he lived to see her smile like that, even knowing it was usually followed by some request likely to leave you broke or injured or both. She turned one of these on McGinty before answering his question, “We have something special to ask of you, Billy.”
Billy knew Lucia well enough to know what that meant, and he placed his elbows on the desk and shoved his face into his hands before responding. His voice was heavy with resignation and only slightly muffled by the shielding warmth of his palms.
“Oh, fuck me sideways. I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?”