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Midnight at the Mass-Freight shipyards was a quiet time. With the galactic economy growing exponentially, the market for gate-capable freighters was brisk and competitive, but not so much that three fully manned shifts would need to run. The main auto-factory floor was churning out parts and sections all the time, but actual human hands would not have any work to do until the day’s parts orders were completed by the massive unmanned assembly lines. Housed in the nearly one-million square foot facility, endless rows of AI-driven milling machines, presses, and extrusion printers twisted and reshaped any number of exotic materials into the basic components of space ships. While the main facility clanged and buzzed with the thousand tinny sounds of bustling machinery, the bulk of the sprawling campus of warehouses, offices, and assorted support buildings remained dark and quiet. Three dozen dead rectangles, all silent in peaceful repose while they awaited the 6AM reveille of two thousand employees.
On the outskirts of the campus stood a large production hangar. Wide and ugly and tall, the structure was nearly windowless and equipped with a retractable roof. Despite the intimidating size of the building, no ships were fated to be built in this hangar. A gate ship was far too enormous a thing to ever be assembled dirtside, but large pieces or whole sections would be cobbled together at this facility. When ready, crew compartments or reactor sections or whatever else was on the day’s work order would get rigged to bulbous lift pods and the roof would be opened. Tug shuttles would attach themselves to the lift pods, and thus large pieces of freighter could then be hoisted into orbit for final assembly into what was usually a mile-long interstellar gate ship. Tonight, there was no sign of any such lofty activity under the canopied roof of the assembly hangar. This was entirely attributable to the fact that Wade Manson and his partner had arranged for this building to be empty, devoid of both material and people, for his usual supply drop. Wade hated doing these, but the weapons and hard creds were too valuable to not show his face at pick-up time. The boys could get... opportunistic... without proper supervision, and Wade knew the best way to avoid problems was to remove the temptation. Taking the occasional outing with his crew also ensured that the troops saw his face and saw him in action. It had been a very long time since Wade had slugged things out at the street level, but he had a reputation to maintain. Taking command of milk runs like this helped with that, he figured.
Wade’s first clue that tonight was going to go poorly came as soon as the truck backed up to the loading dock. His code failed to open the bay door, and the accompanying frustration birthed a lengthy string of profanity. This may have been the worst of his complaints for the evening if things had not continued to deteriorate sharply from there.
“The motor’s busted, boss,” one of his men stated. “It’s unlocked, but it ain’t opening.”
“We’ll just go and open it manually, then.” Wade tried to sound calm. Things were off to a rocky start, but hand-cranking a door open from the inside was not a catastrophe.
Wade had to unlock the side door for his crew. He did not trust any of his men with the codes, not when there was a million untraceable hard creds and two tons of unregistered weapons and ammo involved. It also cemented his position as the authority. Street muscle were not sophisticated thinkers, and they needed these subtle clues about hierarchy from time to time.
The door panel lit up green and a sharp ‘click!’ indicated that the door was now unlatched. Wade pushed through and stepped into a cavernous assembly area. Four of his men followed while two waited outside with the truck. It was a tiny group to be dealing with so important a cargo, but Wade had learned that secrecy was a far better way to protect a valuable shipment than manpower would ever be. Cruising up to a shipyard with five trucks and forty guys would have been very hard to explain to anyone curious enough to inquire about it. On the other hand, a single truck cruising around the shipyards was the sort of thing people ignored every day.
Wade found the lights and keyed them up so he could get a look at the door situation. To his irritation, only about a quarter of the lights came on. It looked to Wade like only the center strip of light fixtures was working, and the outer rows remained dark and unresponsive despite multiple attempts to get them to start. He bashed the switch over and over, as if the problem was that four hundred light fixtures were simply not noticing they had been switched on, and forceful repetition would somehow alert them to the oversight. He gave up after far too many tries and sighed.
He wondered to himself, First the damn door and now the lights? Who’s taking care of this shithole? He had bought off the security guards, as a matter of policy; now he made a mental note to bribe the maintenance staff as well next time. Then he shrugged and put it out of his mind.
Having accepted that the lights were on the fritz, he looked around. The hangar remained dim in a way that birthed no small quantity of distress. Deep shadows filled corners and large pools of impenetrable blackness blanketed the equipment and machinery stored and stacked along the perimeter of the open hangar space. There was enough light to fix the door and to get his supplies loaded, at least. This would have to do because Wade did not have the time or energy to worry about much else.
His shipment was exactly where it was supposed to be. Which went a long way toward calming his nerves. Eight man-sized shipping containers sat in a neat stack on the loading dock, separated from his truck by a mere ten feet and one very well-constructed steel door. This was as it should have been, and he sighed in relief at the sight of it.
Then he heard something very strange, and his eyes moved upward where they saw something that was not as it should have been. A voice, gruff but surprisingly in tune, was singing.
“Six long months I spent in Quinzy,
Six long months doing nothing at all!
Six long months I spent in Quinzy,
Learning to dance for Flanagan’s ball...”
Wade hurled another string of profanity at this new frustration, and his relief evaporated like liquid nitrogen in a hothouse. There was a small bearded man sitting atop his precious shipment. A short, squat, barrel of a man wearing an orange leisure suit and sporting a misshapen mechanical right arm.
“Evenin’ Wade,” said The Dwarf. “Welcome to the ball.”
Wade’s profane diatribe was long and meandering. It started with his surprise at seeing Rodney McDowell in this location and at this time, and moved beyond that to speculate as to Rodney’s motives, parentage, and sexual proclivities. Then it trailed off to stunned silence right around the time he had gotten to The Dwarf’s probable positions on bestiality versus necrophilia.
When his avalanche of invective had spent its energy, Rodney clapped slowly.
“JAY-zus fookin’ Christ almighty, Wade, me boy! A lad might start to wonder if yer happy to see him or not with a greetin’ like that! Do ye kiss my mother with that mouth?”
“What the fuck are you doing here, Rodney?” Wade scanned with his eyes the open space of the assembly area. He was sure the loathsome little runt wasn’t alone, but he couldn’t see any of the little man’s crew nearby. Wade was smart enough to assume the lighting issue was not an accident, and the mobster quickly surmised that most of the shadows surrounding him and his men probably hid an assortment of Dockside muscle. His own boys, competent as they were, had already drawn down on the hirsute gangster and were ready to open fire at the first sign from their boss.
“I think that’d be kind of obvious, Wade,” the Dwarf chuckled. “I’m havin’ a ball, and robbin’ the shite out a’ ye.”
“No, you’re not,” Wade was too cagey to buy the story. Something wasn’t right. “If you were robbing me, you wouldn’t have waited for me to show up. You’d have just taken my shit and cleared out.” He paused, thinking for a minute, “If this was a hit, you’d have ambushed me already, for that matter. So it ain’t a robbery, and it ain’t a hit. So, I ask again, Rodney. What the fuck are you doing here?”
The Dwarf rewarded Wade’s cleverness with a broad smile. “Yer a sharp lad, aren’t ya? But not too sharp, I hear. Word is, you are trying to take over the whole game here.”
“Does it surprise you?” Manson was playing for time. Something was very wrong about all of this.
“No. But I have it on good authority that ye’ve hooked up with those Brokerage lads, and that’s a wee problem for us Docksiders. We don’t give a shite what you Combine fucks do wit’ yerselves in the other zones, but we just cannae let your power games fook wit’ our nice little thing.”
Wade began to understand, “Ah. I get it. You’re here to scare me into backing off The Brokerage, right? I can be reasonable on that issue. But this ain’t the way to make me play nice.”
“Not so much the scarin’ you part, Wade. We don’t need ye scared. We don’t give a fook what ye do or become, since there’s no more Combine to back ye. Fook off and die, for all we give a shite. No. What we need, Wade, is for yer wee masters to be scared.”
Wade barked a laugh, “You don’t just scare The Brokerage, Rodney. The whole fuckin’ Combine didn’t scare them. They’re just a bunch of crooked lawyers and accountants that only want to organize and manage shit. There isn’t even really a ‘they’ to scare. You might as well shoot into the ocean to scare the waves.”
The Dwarf hopped down from the crate he had been sitting on and walked up to Manson. His men, nervous, jostled their weapons until Wade held up a hand to calm them.
“Did ye ever wonder why they picked you to be the front man for this little jaunt o’ theirs, Wade?”
Manson knew a trick question when he heard it. “I don’t see how that fucking matters, Rodney.”
“It’s because they needed someone ta take the fookin’ fall for knocking off the Combine, and it needed to be someone that no one would question was dumb enough to fookin’ try. They went lookin’ for the toughest, loudest, thickest Boss o’ the lot, and they told ya you would get to be king fer playin’ ball.”
Wade stiffened, that did sound familiar.
“Tell me, Mr. Big bad boss-man of The Sprawl, has The Brokerage ever let anyone be in charge of anything? Or do they just set up shell companies and manage ‘em from afar?”
God damn it! was all Wade’s brain could come up with. He kept his mouth shut while he tried to think his way out of this.
The Dwarf kept pushing. “You’re a patsy and a fall guy, Wade.”
The Boss’s face colored at the insult. His breath hissed through clenched teeth, “Is that a fact, Rodney?”
“It is, Wade, me boy. I can prove it, too.” The Dwarf stepped back, cupped his hands over his mouth and called out into the aether, “If there are any Galapagos mercenaries hidin’ about, ready to ambush and murder us all, please be so kind as ta make yerselves known!”
Wade scowled, and Rodney continued his song while they waited.
“She stepped out, and I stepped in again.
I stepped out, and she stepped in again.
She stepped out, and I stepped in again.
Learning to dance, for Flanagan’s ball!”
Four seconds later, a body plummeted from some inscrutable shadow above them and flopped to the concrete with crunch. Wade’s men gasped and leapt back as the corpse crashed in a bleeding heap barely six feet from their boots. It had made no sound as it fell, and Wade figured the armored man had been dispatched before he dropped. He did not bother to make a close inspection of the corpse. It wore the featureless gray armor of one of Reynard’s mercenaries, and that was as much as he needed to know. The seasoned mob boss began to feel the first icy tendrils of true fear working their way down his spine.
The Dwarf walked over to the dead mercenary and flipped it over with a rough push delivered with the toe of an alligator hide boot. Blank eyes stared into the rafters, and blood seeped from the corner of its open mouth. Rodney sniffed in appreciation, “And here we have the first guest to show up for my little ball. Not so good a dancer this one, eh, Wade?”
“Boys,” Wade growled in a low, menacing tone, “we are getting out of here. Now.” Leaving the money and guns was physically painful, but Wade Manson was no fool. He needed to survive this first and worry about the shipment later.
I am going to gut Reynard like a trout, he promised himself.
“Just a moment there, Wade,” The Dwarf interrupted his retreat. “I dinna think it’s quite so simple a task as you leaving here just now. You see, the problem is that even though we don’t give a fook about you, we kinda do need to shut down yer little operation and deal with that private little army yer friends have had shipped in.”
“I don’t care. I’m out. You don’t have enough guns to stop me, so don’t be an idiot.”
“I don’t have to stop ye, Wade.” The Dwarf turned his back and walked away. He called over his shoulder, “Those gray-clad fookers what are settin’ us all up can’t let ye leave now that ye know about their wee little double-cross now can they?” His voice became a shout, “Isn’t that right, Paulie?”
Another voice boomed from some unseen corner of the warehouse, startling Wade and his men.
“That’s about the size of it, Rodney.”
Wade spun, trying to pinpoint the sound’s origin. His men all whirled as well, training weapons into dark corners and sweeping the shadowed rafters with muzzles. The Dwarf continued his walk, stopping to turn and lean against a piece of lifting equipment where his body was wreathed in darkness.
The voice, echoing through the open space and bouncing off of walls and machinery, was impossible to locate. “You shouldn’t have come, Rodney. We have no issue with you. We wanted Tankowicz.”
“Bullshite. Ye already came hard for me once, ye low-rent fook,” The Dwarf replied.
“True, but tonight we came for Tank, you sawed-off little runt!” There was a groan of gears and motors as a freight elevator started its laborious ascent from below the floor at the far end of the room. The huge four-legged cyborg came into view slowly, rising like a mythical beast from some forgotten abyss. “But in a pinch, I’ll settle for your hide. Your little gang of pre-school hoods will not do so well against Torvald, especially without your big boyfriend to back you up.”
Like a symphony, a hundred weapons clicked and chattered as safeties disengaged and bolts closed on loaded chambers. The shuffling and scraping of dozens of pairs of boots played melody to the harmony of three platoons of mercenaries falling into position, all underscored by the rumbling ascent of the freight lift and the giant mech. In seconds, Wade and his men were surrounded by a hundred or more heavily armed mercenaries, trapped between The Dwarf’s unseen crew and Paulie’s raiders.
“Well lookie there!” Rodney’s voice rang out. “That’s a whole heap ‘o sellsword motherfuckers, now isn’t it just? And they brought their big metal pet, too!” A waterfall of laughter trickled out from the various corners of the room, and Wade realized that The Dwarf had not brought a lot of men.
It’s not enough, he amended to himself. He needs an army!
The laughter petered out and Rodney addressed the disembodied voice of Paulie, “I’ll spell it out for ye, Sherlock. I knew ye’d be here, and I knew what ye’d bring. Ms. Ribiero has made it clear that I’m ta give ye one chance to lay yer weapons down and surrender all peaceful-like before I kill the lot o’ ya. My orthodontist says it’ll be cheaper for me if I just do as she asks, so this is that chance.”
“I see The Dwarf takes orders from women now?” the mercenary laughed. “You’re outgunned and outnumbered, and you want me to stand down?”
“I’ve been married five times, fucko. Ye bet yer arse I do. Now choose.”
Paulie’s answer was a barrage of gunfire that lanced across the assembly floor in crackling orange streaks. Ricochets and showers of burning ceramic bead fragments followed as the fusillade struck the machinery at the far side and exploded into pyrotechnic chaos. Wade Manson threw himself to the floor with a shriek and crawled for cover. His men scattered like cockroaches and were subsequently shredded in the crossfire when more guns blazed from within the shadows of the opposite side of the building. The return fire came in concentrated bursts, more slowly and with less accuracy. This distinction made it no less terrifying to the portly gangster than the concentrated marksmanship of the professional fighters. Either side was just as likely to kill him as he scrambled like a one-legged crab just to get to cover.
Manson made it to the loading dock and dove behind his precious supply crates. He was breathing in great heaving gasps, and at some point in the fray he had lost control of his bladder. But his dignity was the least of his concerns as he fumbled through his pockets for his comm.