Red Noise Read online

  It was bullshit, and she could tell by his goldfish expression that he knew it was bullshit that put him between a rock and a hard place. She looked at him just long enough to unnerve before nodding a half inch.

  “Obliged, I’m sure,” she said. The dockmaster couldn’t seem to smile without smirking, but he looked to be trying his best.

  The Miner strolled on to the berth holding her ship and opened the station side of the airlock. Ship side stayed closed.

  “Hey ship,” she said, standing right in front of the camera. “It’s me. Open up.”

  There was a slight pause, just enough to make her frown. “Hi, boss! Welcome home!” The inside hatch opened for her, and she closed it afterward.

  It took her a moment to readjust to the higher gravity on her ship. Waste of energy, but it helped keep her in shape. She took the steps up to the main deck at a sprint, passing the strapped-down and covered mining equipment that she probably wouldn’t get back to using for a while. She stopped and looked, considering her options for ad-hoc weapons, but decided that she didn’t want them to know that she really was a miner: too much incentive to wreck her equipment or cause other kinds of trouble if things went south.

  “Ship, let me know the moment the docking clamps are released.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  “Ship…” She bit her lip. “What do you think about all this?”

  “I think you’re full of shit, boss.”

  The Miner laughed. That was a canned response to the question “what do you think?”, one of eight she’d preprogrammed. She could ask again and get a different answer, but that defeated the purpose. Anyway, she had a sneaking suspicion that the ship put its digital finger on the scales somehow, that the answers weren’t as random as they could be. For one thing, she hadn’t heard “I think it’s brilliant, boss!” in a long time.

  She went to the printer terminal and with a few key presses brought up a menu with a few secret options, stuff from the old days. After some consideration, she set it to printing some surveillance gear – nothing fancy, she didn’t have a lot of time, or for that matter a lot of raw materials for electronics.

  While she waited, she went up to the plant room and got started setting up the watering rig. She didn’t want to have to come back here too regularly, in case someone got the bright idea to set up an ambush. Unpredictability and orchid care rarely went hand-in-hand. Tiny drip tubes were run already, but had to be purged of air and checked for kinks and blockages so that she wouldn’t come back to find dead flowers, or worse a dead bonsai. The spiky pink Dendrobium ceraula was coming along nicely, finally, and she’d hate to lose that progress.

  The red maple was badly in need of a trimming. She took a moment to sweep away a few of its tiny crimson leaves, collect them carefully, and put them in the digester. She eyed the row of different-sized shears stuck magnetically to the wall, and had her first feelings of misgiving. A delicate task like that would have to wait: it needed calm, and she’d be lacking in calm for a while. She absentmindedly brushed her hand over the top of the little tree, feeling its tiny leaves and the prick of miniature limbs. The scents from the orchids had been collecting in the small space, mixing with earthy soil funk and a faint sour note from the digester, and she breathed it all in with her eyes closed. She could just run. She had Feeney’s money, bled off a portion of what she’d been cheated out of. That was some measure of revenge. But she had no supplies. And there were the docking clamps, which were designed to do serious damage to any ship trying to leave without clearance. And anyway, with an hour’s work she’d have even more. She could bribe the dockmaster to have “forgotten” to set the clamps, and be gone.

  She pocketed the branch shears and took them to the head. Watching in the spit-spattered mirror, she maneuvered the shears awkwardly behind her skull, then using her left hand she pulled her ponytail taut.

  With a slow, firm squeeze, she cut close to the base of her head, felt the mass of hair fall strand by strand until the whole handful came free. She held it up in front of her, looked without emotion at the white streaks among the black, more than she pictured when she pictured herself. The shears went back in the plant room, and her hair went in the digester. It wasn’t the best haircut she’d ever had – it looked terrible, if she were being honest – but she considered long hair a liability in a fight, and she needed to put her head in the right place for one. Peering at herself in the mirror, she was ten years younger and readier, looking an awful lot like someone she hadn’t ever wanted to be again.

  Her bunk presented decisions that she hadn’t fully thought through yet. She pulled out the top drawer of the dresser, tugging twice against the catch in just the right way that the false back opened. That was the stuff that customs shouldn’t find. She’d kept it more to maybe sell in a pinch than because she ever expected to need it: a couple concussion grenades, some of the more interesting pharmaceuticals from the old days, a few different kinds of plastic explosive. Her old combat knife, kept there mostly to be out of the way. She put the knife on the bed and reassembled the false compartment.

  From under the bunk she pulled a long bag, which she laid on top of the knife. She unsealed it and stared down at her old dress uniform. How much fuel had she wasted over the years hauling this dead weight around? Underneath it was what she was after: two ghostly-gray garments like long silk underwear. Woven diamond fiber was itchy and prone to make her sweat and get blisters. It was wrinkled from being balled-up, stained in a few places, and more expensive than her ship. It was also technically stolen, but what the hell. These morons were lucky to find the pointy ends of their knives, but sooner or later it would come to shooting. Besides, she had to admit that she was out of practice, and anyone could get lucky. She stripped down out of her dirty jumpsuit and shivered at the cool, smooth touch of the thin armor as she pulled it up her legs and down over her head. A clean jumpsuit went on over it, and a look in the mirror told her that it wasn’t too obvious underneath. She strapped the knife to her thigh over that.

  She considered real armament. The rifle would be easiest, but that would definitely be the hard way. She didn’t plan to make friends, but stepping off the ship with her service rifle in hand would be declaring war on everybody. She might win, but probably not.

  The flechette pistol was attractive, being small and relatively powerful, but she wasn’t sure if it would fall under the firearms rule. It wouldn’t blow a hole in the bulkhead or ricochet much, but she didn’t feel like arguing the matter, and anyway McMasters would probably be happy for an excuse to toss her off the station, or just out an airlock. The shotgun was tempting too, and definitely wouldn’t cause a decompression – which is why she had it handy on her little ship – but again she wanted to stay on the right side of their law, such as it was, at least for the moment.

  That left one option. She took the sword down off the wall gently, with both hands. Its black canvas-covered sheath, its textured silicone grip, felt familiar like a childhood song. She’d picked it up before, of course, when it fell or to clean it, but taking it up to use again was altogether different. It felt light and heavy at the same time, and she had a feeling of rapidly sobering up. This… escalated things. Maybe not like the rifle, but she hadn’t really considered that. If she didn’t pull off her plan fast, this would guarantee that things got messy. But she reminded herself that looking impressive and acting decisively would make sure she could pull it off. Half-measures result in more bloodshed, cadet, not less.

  She pushed with her thumb to disengage the magnetic clasp and the blade sprang free an inch from its sheath. The metal gleamed in the soft blue-tinted light of her cabin.

  She hung the sword at her hip, and in twenty seconds the familiar weight had been there all along.

  KILLING RINGS

  “Oi!”

  The Miner froze in mid-stride when the hoarse voice came from behind her. She had her hand on her sword hilt before even thinking about it, pulling gently against the clasp.


  She recognized him by the bandage on his lip where she’d pulled the ring out. He’d ditched the steel bar in favor of a heavy fire axe, and he held it like he’d swung it before. The edge and the spike both had shiny streaks where they’d been sharpened recently. He stood in the middle of the passage with his feet planted and looked pissed. Either he’d been following her all the way from the port or she’d walked right by him without even noticing; whichever way she cursed herself for a lucky idiot.

  “You think you’re so good,” Rings growled. His fingers whitened where he gripped the axe. “I’d like to see what you can do when you’re not sucker-punching a guy, eh?”

  “I can kill you,” she said flatly. Her heart raced and her implants warmed up fast. “I’m not just some bruiser, kid. I’ve been trained, and you haven’t.”

  He’d picked a decent spot for his confrontation, in a place where the last security camera she’d noticed had been defaced. Probably a dead angle in the surveillance, and not a lot of foot traffic. They’d have privacy, which cut both ways.

  “I’m not going to lose to some fucked-up old lady,” he sneered. “You caught me by surprise last time, that’s all.”

  “Sorry for embarrassing you,” she said quietly. She let her posture relax a little bit, made herself come out of the crouch and look less concerned. Her own advice from earlier came back to her, don’t punch someone you’re not willing to kill. “It wasn’t personal.”

  “Sorry? Shit, you’re not sorry yet, not like you’re gonna be.”

  He’s psyching himself up, she thought. She knew she ought to de-escalate, but that had never exactly been in her core skill set. It was one thing to know that she should give him an out, a way to save face, it was another thing to know how to do it when her blood was up.

  “There’s nobody watching, kid. Back off.”

  He was stupid, and he rushed her. Without time to think, she whipped her sword out and up. He’d been close, but she was faster than him and she cut deeply across his midsection as she stepped hard into his swing. She felt hot blood and his arm came down limply; she heard the axe clatter and tumble. Continuing the turn, she planted her foot and watched him fall.

  Blood flowed freely onto the deck and dripped from her lowered blade. Rings gasped wetly and pushed with his feet until his back hit the wall. He kept kicking feebly, then stopped.

  The Miner stood awhile, feeling suddenly very tired. Well, what the hell had she expected, anyway. She took out a scrap of cloth, wiped down her sword blade, and sheathed it. The closest doctor was two decks away, and that wound was too big to put pressure on.

  Looking down at her dying assailant, she saw something she’d missed before – a small camera pinned to his shirt. She swore at herself, stooped to pick it off him, then dropped it on the deck away from the quickly-spreading pool and stomped it. If he could be saved, if anyone cared to, his friends knew where he was. If not, they didn’t need to watch him die, and they didn’t need to hear her say, “I’m sorry,” before she left.

  GETTING EVEN

  The two goons in the buyer’s outer office sprang to their feet when the Miner came in the door. They stared at the sword on her belt and the spattered blood on her face and clothes. Her mood hadn’t been improved by the fight, nor by the time she’d spent in bitter self-recriminations.

  “Relax,” she said. They declined to relax. “Mr Feeney sent me to have a little chat with our friend in there. I need to talk to him alone. Check with the old man if you need to, but don’t breathe a word to Gordonson.”

  She didn’t make a hostile move, just waited while they huddled around a small comm screen. When they looked up and nodded, she told them to stand guard in the hallway and they did.

  Gordonson looked up when the door to his inner office opened, and she enjoyed the look of terror on his face when he saw her. “Relax,” she said again. He also declined. She sat down in the same chair as before. “Haven’t you heard? I’m working for Feeney now. We’re on the same side.”

  He didn’t seem to find that particularly soothing. She passed him a comm screen with a video loaded up on it. The dockmaster had graciously given her a copy, and she in turn strongly urged the buyer to watch. Two minutes later, she was still smiling and he had lost all the color in his cheeks. It took him two tries to slide the screen back across the desk to her.

  “Well,” he said at last in a thin voice. He coughed. “Well. I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  “So am I,” she said. She leaned forward and put her elbows on his desk, showing bloodstains on her sleeves. “It’s just, I got to thinking about our earlier conversation. You said something pretty funny. I asked if you could go higher, and you said something like, ‘I don’t see any reason to.’ Was that it?”

  “Ah.” His voice sounded strangled.

  “Ah.” Hers didn’t.

  “Well, obviously matters have changed some. Situations have changed. I… made a mistake, possibly.”

  The Miner leaned back into her chair again and crossed her legs, seemingly oblivious to the way it made her sword clatter against the chair’s side. “I think, possibly, you did. Let’s have a second look at that assay.”

  He seemed about to repeat that it was confidential, and then appeared to think better of it. In his evident panic, she realized that they probably hadn’t actually done one. She smiled. “Or whatever you think is fair, Mr Gordonson. You’re the expert.”

  Visibly uncomfortable, he fumbled to operate his pad, and when he finally succeeded he hurriedly scrolled through something she couldn’t see. She wondered what it might be, since it probably wasn’t a materials composition assay. Maybe a romance novel. Or a spy thriller – he seemed the type.

  “Ah,” he said. “I think, yes, I think I may have underestimated the value of that particular, um, isotope. And of course, arsenic processing is an advancing field, it’s not as expensive as it once was. Naturally, we can buy the extracted arsenic, which I had been planning to have the refinery credit you for later, of course, maybe I forgot to say that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would you say, twenty thousand?”

  “Hmm.” She stroked her chin, feeling the scar along her jawline. “On top of the ten thousand you already paid, that does seem fair.”

  He winced, but nodded and tried to smile. “Quite fair, yes. Are we agreed?”

  “I think so,” she said, and passed her bank chip over. He accessed it again and after a last moment of hesitation, transferred another twenty thousand credits.

  “I…” He stared down at his pad. “This is a real account, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “I’m just curious. I mean, I have to ask…” She raised an eyebrow and he blurted out, “How the hell did you get a legitimate account at a major accredited bank under the name ‘Mickey Fucking Mouse’?”

  She grinned. “I guess I’m just really persuasive.”

  He stared at her, hollow-eyed and unbelieving. “Say hello to Mr Feeney for me,” he said.

  “Oh, I will.”

  MAYBE MORE THAN EVEN

  The Miner waited while Feeney’s face cycled through an impressive array of colors, and for a moment thought he’d have a stroke.

  “Son of a bitch,” he managed. “Disloyal little toad! I’ve made him rich, that ingrate! I’ve given him protection, I’ve given him cover, kickbacks, laundered his money, and this is how he repays me?”

  He swept the glassware off the desk so hard it all shattered against the wall. The Miner slowly but pointedly reclaimed her bank chip showing the “proof” that had sent Feeney into a steaming rage: twenty thousand credits’ worth of hush money paid by Gordonson when she’d confronted him with his treachery. She bent to rescue a glass off the floor that had merely chipped, and then languidly stood and filled it from the decanter on the sideboard – the cheap stuff, she noted.

  “I’m too loyal,” Feeney was saying. “I’m too goddamned loyal, Jane, that’s my problem. Loyal to Gordonson,
loyal to Angelica. They all told me to cut Wilfred loose, and by God I know I should have, but I’m too goddamned loyal, and they all take advantage of me. Now look at me.”

  He rounded on her, planting both hands on his desk and leaning forward. “They’re bleeding me, my good Mick. I’m telling you, they’re bleeding me like two dozen leeches. Business has been shite since this damn fighting started, since that ingrate Angelica cut my feet out from under me. Instead of running my operations I’ve been paying out for these lousy cut-rate gangsters. Why? Because otherwise she’ll hire them and overrun me. Nobody stays at this hotel who pays. Nobody gambles at my casino she’s squatting in either. Nobody comes to this damn station at all except lunatics who come for a fight and to suck me dry.”

  “He can’t have been at it long,” the Miner offered after a sip of rescued whiskey. It wasn’t nearly as good as the good stuff. “After all, your guards keeping an eye on him would have noticed before too long.”

  Feeney stopped ranting and went completely still. He started tapping his fingers on his desk, then sat heavily in his chair. The Miner watched him make a call and speak in low, angry tones. While he talked, she pretended to scratch herself behind the neck and retrieved the bug she’d printed on her ship, tucked in her collar. She shifted in her chair and dropped it between the cushion and the arm.

  Feeney cut the call and smiled grimly. “Well, those two can earn their pay, at least.”

  The Miner nodded. “By the way,” she said offhandedly, “I had to kill one of Angelica’s people.”

  Feeney stared. “What, now?”

  “No big deal. One of those I beat up earlier took a run at me in the back passages. Now he’s dead.”

  Feeney ran his hands through his thin white hair. “Well, these things happen,” he said, seemingly more to himself than to her. “As long as nobody saw it–”