Aphrodites tears, p.16
Aphrodite's Tears, page 16
“Yeah, but he ain’t working alone. The Balisongs talked about a couple of women with the fixer back in Dockside. If this really is the same guy, then I want to know who they are and if they are here, too. This fixer also said he had a military exemption, so somebody’s got to get that information from the RUC. I don’t have that kind of juice. So you gotta do that too, Link.”
“Fine,” Hardesty sounded tired and irritated at having to get his hands dirty, but Craddock did not care. “I will run this mess to the ground for you, Link, but you and I are due for a reckoning soon.”
“I’ll read you in on everything as soon as I can, Al. Trust me. We’ve known each other for a long time. I would not expose you to anything that could harm our relationship.”
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Get me that intel and get your house in order before Manny breaks in. And believe me, he’ll get in. So just make sure there is nothing for him to find when he does.
“Of course.” Hardesty nodded his agreement. “Alasdair?”
“Yeah, Link?”
“Big things are coming. Things that will secure the future for Free Venus. I need you to know that no matter what happens, I am loyal to the cause and we will live to see a Free Venus. Together.”
“That’s real nice to hear, Link. Get me that intel and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Craddock cut the connection, leaving Lincoln Hardesty staring at a blank screen. Gnarled fingers sporting neatly manicured nails wiped a face lined with age and stress. With a deep sigh he looked out through his penthouse window, overlooking the capital city of Free Venus. It was well into the city’s night cycle, and the dome lights had been lowered to minimum to help with sleep patterns. But Caelestus never really slept, and a sprawling metropolis of steel and light spread out below him. Ten thousand blinking dots pulsed like the synapses of an overworked brain, streaks of light darting across the blackness to disappear like the fleeting thoughts of a child’s fancy. There was a beauty in it all, but Lincoln Hardesty had lost the taste for it.
He sighed again, and swung his gaze back to his terminal. Fingers tapped against the controls, coding instructions to underlings and sending missives to allies. Craddock would get his information, though the harder items would be costly to acquire. More difficult would be managing the surly terrorist’s suspicions. Craddock did not rise to his current position by being stupid or reckless. The man had a devilish cunning and preternatural instincts for trouble. He was a useful and powerful ally. Though like any well-trained-yet-vicious animal, he could be very dangerous to work with all the same. The situation was far too precarious for his liking. The boy was unaware of what it was he was holding, that much was obvious. As long as he never figured it out, things would be fine.
However, if the spineless little turncoat put the pieces together, it would spell disaster for Hardesty and the Red Hats alike. The lie to Craddock had been more painful than he thought it would be, but Hardesty had long ago outgrown his zeal for a Free Venus. If Venus truly wanted to be free, it would be. Too many of the rank and file were satisfied with Council leadership, and without unity, the industrial domes would never be free of that yoke. The Troubles had been very profitable for Lincoln Hardesty, however. Thus his participation in the conflict had increased even as his convictions weakened over the years. The irony was not lost on him.
Sometimes, when he was deep into his drinks or caught in a rare moment of reflection, Lincoln Hardesty would feel a great pang of guilt and sadness over this. There was something comforting and cleansing about the absolute unwavering dedication to an ideal. It kept things like guilt and responsibility from weighing a man down, and allowed him to become a creature of pure purpose. Great things could be accomplished when a person spared no thought or effort for anything but the goal. Tantalizing as it was, it was a conceit restricted to the underdeveloped mind. Nothing that simplistic could survive scrutiny or logic. When Hardesty could no longer hold back the encroaching doubts of a maturing worldview, he was forced to abandon those ideals for more practical goals. Still, he envied those who could hold onto the singular drive of a pure zealot. He missed the simplicity of it all. But then he would sober up and realize that he had no desire to trade his current situation for that of a Red Hat.
To emphasize this point to himself, Hardesty pinged the concierge for a nice steak dinner that cost more than a Venusian laborer made in a week, then scheduled his favorite prostitute for an after-dinner appointment. Craddock would handle Manuel Richardson and the fixer, so there was no need to get too upset about it. Despite his own greed, that man still had more than a little fanatic left in him. An honest opportunity to take the nav pylons would keep him focused for a while yet, so Hardesty would let him have as much rope as he asked for.
It was a very calm and detached Lincoln Hardesty who answered the gentle chime of his door. Dinner had arrived and there was no sense in letting an expensive meal get cold, after all.
Chapter Eighteen
Roland and Mindy met up with Manny and Lucia in an unused supply depot. It was little more than a large closet with steel shelving along bare gray walls, with a small attached office. Manny insisted that the dark space had been unused for decades, and the level of dust and accumulated grime sticking to every surface supported this assertion. The Colander was riddled with such spaces below the old refractories. At the peak of production, the giant dome had been crammed full of workers and equipment. Work crews would be hot-bunking and every space living and breathing with the noise and activity of three-shift production schedules. Times had changed on the fiery orange planet, and the intervening decades had been unkind to the aging facility. Once refining moved to more modern facilities or off-world, many places exactly like this one had simply been abandoned to the ravages of time. The door, closed and locked decades before, yielded to Manny’s ministrations with some small protest. Yet it opened all the same, and the team set up camp inside it for their clandestine stay on Venus.
Lucia found the adjustment to be more difficult than she thought it was going to be. Despite her career change in the last year, her sensibilities were still those of a rich Uptown girl. She had been on camping trips before, and she assumed campaigning on Venus would something like that. Upon reflection, this was a patently stupid assumption. Camping with her college friends had involved a very nice sleeping pod, decent food, comfortable clothes, and no small quantity of alcohol. Here on Venus, she had none of those things. Their hidden base camp, abandoned as it was, was nowhere near any area with reliable cooling. The metal cube had to be close to one hundred degrees, and there was no cool night breeze wafting down from Cadillac Mountain inside. What she had now was the omnipresent sticky heat of poorly conditioned air surreptitiously borrowed from other more comfortable areas. It was enough to keep them from boiling in their own juices, while also woefully inadequate for comfort. The atmosphere, unfiltered and stale, was redolent of sulfur, oil, and sweat. Where was the soothing aroma of Douglas Fir and Jack pine trees? Instead of a luxurious and expensive sleeping pod, she had a bedroll of simple textiles. Not that anyone would be needing blankets to sleep in the stifling heat. On the whole, this was nothing like camping, and the discomfort was needling at her mood. She couldn’t even complain to anyone. Roland did not perceive hot, cold, humidity or pain the way others did, so he was likely as comfortable as he ever was. Even if that was not the case he had been a special forces soldier before his conversion, so she suspected he had slept in places far worse than this either way. It occurred to her that Roland may have slept in a place exactly like this one during his three-month deployment here thirty years ago.
Manny had been born and raised in these domes. He was home, and did not look to be at all uncomfortable setting up his own bedroll and checking his equipment. He had removed his jacket and outer shirt, and he was not even sweating at the moment. It felt like a personal insult.
Lucia knew that Mindy would not complain either. She was a famous assassin, mercenary, and bounty hunter. Her professional pride would never allow her to admit to so paltry a weakness as physical discomfort. She expected the killer to gripe a little bit, just for the jokes. However, when push came to shove, Mindy was a pro.
So with an internal sigh of epic proportions, Lucia resolved herself to suffering in silence. She tried not to groan with disgust as she peeled the PC-10 gantlets from her arms, rivers of greasy sweat flowing from inside as they slid off her slick skin. Her jacket was next, and after a moment’s consideration for modesty, her outer shirt as well. Her undershirt was plastered to her body, and the wetness cooled her skin once the air was able to touch it. While it was not a look she would have chosen for herself, she had to concede that based upon what she had seen of most Venusian dress, she would fit right in looking like this. At least the thin shirt was a deep navy blue, and thus it did not reveal anything that might get Manny killed by Roland for the crime of looking. He was still a young man, and internal discipline was new to him.
The cyborg and the assassin were late. In hindsight, this should have come as no surprise to anyone. Even with a solid location fix, navigating the labyrinth of tunnels and ad hoc passageways beneath the refractory level was the sort of quest that would have given Lewis and Clark the fits. The additional necessity of constantly discouraging tails while meandering through The Colander slowed an already arduous trip to a frustrating crawl.
Roland, being impossible to conceal, would have to walk far out ahead of Mindy, where he would inevitably pick up a follower intent upon broadcasting his destination to Craddock. Mindy would then remove the tail in a manner both painful and humiliating. The tiny blond assassin demonstrated remarkable creativity and a disconcerting level of glee with this part of the job. On Roland’s strict instructions, none of these individuals died for her efforts. What was certain was all of Craddock’s men would carry the shame of Mindy’s ministrations for long years afterward.
Eventually, the pair did arrive at the designated location, and Lucia greeted them both with a look both concerned and irritated. “You guys okay? Where have you been?”
“Had to lose a bunch of Craddock’s guys. Slowed us down.” Roland saw the expression on Lucia’s face and he answered the silent question there. “No fatalities.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. “Everybody is buzzing about your meeting with Craddock. Just couldn’t restrain yourself, could you?” If her tone was a touch disapproving, she hid it well.
“I needed to draw attention. Mindy was doing recon while I was in there, so I figured it was prudent to be distracting.”
“It worked,” Mindy added. “I was able to go all over without anyone paying me any attention at all.”
Mindy had begun to peel layers of sweaty clothing off, eventually arriving at her blue armored jumpsuit. This she unzipped and opened, fanning herself with the lapel and only incidentally making Manny choke and stumble.
“I bet,” Manny snorted when he had recovered his balance and his dignity. “Putting Craddock on his heels is a big thing down here. He likes to parade his metal men around like his own personal army. Most folk on these levels are pretty scared of them.”
Manny abruptly lost his train of thought because Mindy had begun drying her cleavage with a towel.
“Cut it out, Mindy, you’ll give Manny a heart attack,” Lucia chided the half-naked assassin. At least Mindy was as uncomfortable as she was. Somehow, knowing that Mindy shared her misery made things just a little more bearable. Then she addressed the matter at hand “You mean cyborg armatures? Are they a problem here?” Lucia had seen Roland handle cyborgs before, and barring the really big and nasty ones, they never seemed too much of an issue.
Manny realized that Lucia had not spent much time below the refractory level yet. “Venus has a lot of armatures, Boss. A whole lot. Second only to Enceladus.”
Understanding broke across Lucia’s features. With understanding came waves of probabilities. She had never seen more than one or two armatures in one place before, and the ramifications of operating in this environment suddenly manifested in her mind as a thousand variable outcomes. A normal person would just shake their head at this and sort it out one step at a time. Lucia, however, had nearly infinite parallel processing power and her brain immediately began to imagine and calculate all the branching possibilities.
The rest of her team recognized the change in her demeanor and held their collective breaths. She was either going to come out of the spell with a highly complex analysis of their situation, or the exercise would devolve into a panic attack. Since the recalibration of her nanomachines had become necessary, it was very much a toss-up as to which it would be.
Mindy had learned to feed Lucia productive information and encourage solution-based thinking when this occurred, so she rattled off information about numbers, makes, models and configurations of what she had seen while Roland was dealing with Craddock. Lucia’s voice was tight and clipped while she asked relevant questions and sought clarification as needed. The bulging muscles in her neck and jaw made it obvious she was working against encroaching panic, but it also looked like she was winning the fight.
Roland hated to see her struggle like this, especially when he knew that a few firmware updates from her father could kill her anxiety completely. It was a tantalizing solution, an easy fix to take away all of her fear. This would come with a price however, and nobody was ready for Lucia’s personality to devolve into an emotionless difference engine. The correct balance between biotechnical assistance and her natural personality had proven very elusive up to this point, and this made it hard for Lucia to experience a normal existence. She was determined to master her mind and her machines nonetheless, so Roland supported her efforts wholeheartedly. It was a thing he had more than a little experience with, and together they were unique in the galaxy. Though their origins could not have been more different, the pure randomness of happenstance had put the same demon in their heads and pulled them together to fight it. The old soldier respected fighters, and he knew there were many different kinds of fight. This one was hers and hers alone. There was an odd poetry in this. A symmetry Roland lacked the soul and emotion to truly explore. He saw it and appreciated it for what it was, and that was the best he could do for now. It was enough.
On this occasion Lucia was victorious over her demon, and after a moment her face relaxed. “Okay. It looks like those of us who can’t bench-press a third-world country are going to need to tread lightly down here. Roland, I can’t tell one armature from another. Can my CZ punch through these things or am I whistling Dixie?”
“Avoid the chest and limbs. Those are all going to be reinforced. Your flechettes might get through, but they won’t have enough energy to do much after that. Shooting the helium tanks will be dramatic though it won’t hurt them unless they are outside when you do it.” The big man shrugged. “I’d aim for the face if I were you. The Stahlkorpers and Bobcats will have next to no armor there. Don’t waste your ammo on a Kano.”
Mindy slapped her Sasori dagger affectionately. “I don’t mind tussling with the little ones. Unless these guys have boosted reflexes they’ll never get a paw on me. After that, they are just big ol’ tomato cans if you are prepared for them. At least I brought a proper can opener.”
Manuel, having grown up and lived on Venus most of his life, offered his insights. “Hit them with the gloves, Boss. The Stahlkorpers have virtually no protection from EM stuff. It’s just not a thing that they come with. If you aim for the left side of the chest, you can probably cause the whole chassis to reboot. That’s a ninety-second window where the guy will be completely immobile. Anywhere else is still going to hurt like hell and probably scramble the control signals. Bobcats are a better rig, but if you hit them in the head, they’ll probably reboot, too. Probably.”
“And the Kanos?”
“Avoid them.”
Lucia nodded, sending rivulets of sweat streaking down her neck and over her collarbones. “Are the Kanos that good?”
Mindy answered this one. “Mack had to sign a seven-year contract to get his. It’s a very nice rig, Lucia. The most advanced light chassis you can get without going for military hardware.”
“So how the hell are there high-end rigs like that on this rock?” Lucia wondered aloud. Then she added, “No offense, Manny.”
“None taken, Boss.” Manny waved a hand dismissively and continued. “It’s weird to me too. There were no Kanos in The Colander when I left five years ago.”
Roland’s rejoinder came laced with disbelief. “Somebody paid a lot of money to drop some serious tech down here. For what? Material handling? I call bullshit on that.”
Manny spoke for them all. “I don’t like it.”
“Are they Craddock’s or Hardesty’s? Or maybe someone else’s?” Roland asked the group. “Ideas?”
Manny looked up at Roland, eyes narrow. “No way to know unless...”
“You think I should go pick one up?”
Manny shrugged, “Can you handle a Kano by yourself without scrapping it?”
Roland looked insulted. “I beat Grim Roper with my bare hands, kid.”
The young man stared back with blank features. “Who’s Grim Roper?”
Lucia groaned. “Long story, Manny. Some other time. As for taking a Kano in for questioning? That feels like a very bad idea. Like maybe we’d be tipping our hands really early if we did that. I’d prefer a more measured approach for now. Are you making a run at Craddock’s records soon, Manny?”
“Yes. Ellie is setting up my opportunity right now.”
“Good. Try to either establish if those things are his, or eliminate him as suspect.”
“That will depend on how good his records are, Boss. I might find nothing.”
Lucia tried to blow the magenta stripe of hair away from her eye. The stubborn streak remained plastered to her forehead with sweat, so she flicked it back with an angry jab of her finger instead. “We can always send Roland out if it’s inconclusive. Just trying to avoid that drama for now.”
