Cauldron of Ghosts (29 page)

Chapter 31

“Does he
ever
stick to a plan?” groused Yana, after she read the message on the screen that Anton had just decrypted.

“Not that I can recall,” said Anton. His tone of voice was mild. “Do keep in mind that the universe never seems to stick to a plan either. Relax, Yana. Victor is in a league of his own when it comes to improvising. He’s something of a genius at it.”

Yana looked dubious. “I thought the idea was to steer clear of Lower Radomsko altogether.”

“Yes, it was. That’s because if you muck around in that area, some gang is bound to jump you. But that’s sort of a moot point now, isn’t it? Just crossing one little itty-bitty corner of the place brought a gang down on us. Or I should say, down on Thandi Palane and Victor Cachat.”

Yana chuckled. “Talk about shooting for the Darwin Award.”

Anton nodded. “As acts of suicidal folly goes, that one’s a real contender for the title. We didn’t plan for it, but what’s done is done. And now we’ve cleared a corner for ourselves in Lower Radomsko. So why not set up shop? There are some real advantages to working out of that area, you know, in addition to the drawbacks.”

“Such as?”

“For starters, the Mesan authorities ignore Lower Radomsko almost entirely. Saburo told us they occasionally send in a few agents, but that’s only for specific purposes. Tracking down runaway slaves, usually.”

“Okay. What else?”

“None of the automatic surveillance equipment works in Lower Radomsko. I mean,
none.
The local gangs make it a point to trash anything that gets set up. According to Saburo, the Mesan security agencies don’t even try any more except when some newly appointed big shot does the usual new-broom-sweeps-clean routine. Then they piddle around for a while installing surveillance devices, all of which get wrecked almost as soon as they’re set up. After a few weeks, the new big shot has become a worn down and wiser big shot. That happens pretty fast in agencies working in the seccy districts. Either that, or the big shot just gets fired—sorry, transferred laterally—and a more sensible person comes in as their replacement.”

“And . . . what else?”

“You have to fend off other Lower Radomsko gangs, but the bigger and stronger crime organizations in other districts leave you alone. It’s just not worth it for them to deal with the headaches involved.”

Having finally found what seemed like a flaw in the new plan, Yana pounced. “Yeah—exactly! We’ll be wasting most of our time and energy defending ourselves against petty gangsters.”

Anton leaned back in his chair and looked up at the tall woman. The expression on his face was simultaneously pitying and derisive.

“Which part of ‘Thandi Palane and Victor Cachat’ did you miss, Yana? The one thing we are
not
going to be doing is defending ourselves against petty gangsters.”

Yana stared at him, then at the screen. Then, scratched her jaw. “I take it phrases like ‘preemptive strike’ and ‘do unto others before they do unto you’ are applicable here.”

Anton smiled and looked back at the message. He indicated the last two sentences with a finger. “This is the real problem on our hands at the moment. Forget the gangsters. Wannabe gangsters, I should say.”

Yana studied the sentences.
Lorry serviceable and cargo fine. But will need new personal transport.

“What’s the problem?” she asked. “That dealer he bought the air car from had plenty of others on his lot.”

Anton clucked his tongue. “How does it happen that a former Scrag is such a neophyte—I’m tempted to say, a hopeless naif—when it comes to the basic principles of crime and wrongdoing?”

She grinned. “We’re super soldiers, remember? Did Achilles and Hector know how to pick locks?”

Anton was a little surprised that Yana knew the Homeric legends. But only a little. You had to be careful with terms like “Scrags.” Leaving aside the fact that it might be offensive to people like Yana—although it usually wasn’t; ex-Scrags were anything but thin-skinned—the bigger problem was that it could lead you to underestimate them.

Yes, the descendants of the “super soldiers” of the Final War tended to be arrogant, narcissistic, often ignorant and way too full of themselves. But there was a reason for the term “super.” That hadn’t been mere propaganda on the part of the Ukrainian tyrants who created Yana’s ancestors and set them loose on the world. Even as heavily outnumbered as they’d been, the super soldiers had come awfully close to winning the Final War in its opening phases. Of course, once the initial surprise attacks had been blunted and everyone had started opening up their own private arsenals of horrors, things had gone downhill for all concerned.

Quickly.

“You still haven’t explained why Victor can’t just go back to the same dealer,” she said.

“Think it through, Yana. All the way through. What’s Victor’s new cover story going to be? He just blew off completely any chance that anyone with half a brain is going to believe he’s really an investigative reporter. Didn’t he?”

She rubbed her jaw again. “Um. Yeah. Unless he figures out a way to shift it all onto Thandi.”

Anton shook his head. “That’d be stupid. Thandi looks like a big dumb laborer now. Victor will want to keep that disguise going. He’ll let it slip that she helped him some, probably, but he’ll take most of the credit for destroying that gang.”

“I
still
don’t see why he can’t just buy himself another air car.”

“How did he lose the one he had? The last thing he wants people in Lower Radomsko to think now is the truth—which is that Thandi got ambushed and he wrecked the car coming to her aid. No, no, no. That won’t do at all for—”

His voice, already deep, dropped another octave. “Achmed the Atrocious, new crime lord of Lower Radomsko. Soon to be
over
-lord of the dump. So it’ll seem, anyway.”

Comprehension dawned. “Okay, I get it. He
planned
to wreck the air car. From the moment he bought the damn thing.”

“From the moment he landed on Mesa,” Anton corrected her. “Hell, who knows? Maybe the fiend planned it before he even left the Core.”

There was nothing wrong with Yana’s brain. She had already thought through the logic. “Right. And would a criminal mastermind
buy
himself a new air car after deliberately wrecking the one he had? Not hardly. Not when he can sell the wreckage for parts and scrounge up another one by taking it from the next gang who gets the Victor treatment.”

She shook her head. “He is a bad, bad man, Anton.”

“They don’t call him Achmed the Atrocious for nothing.”

* * *

“Are you sure, Victor?” Thandi asked. She gave the two wounded criminals slumped in the back of the lorry’s cab a look that was free of anything resembling the gentler virtues. Mercy, compassion, empathy—not a trace. “That equipment is expensive to run, you know.”

Victor’s lips quirked. “We have plenty of money. And what better way to make sure it’s working properly?”

For their part, neither Callie nor Teddy—a name Thandi thought was ridiculous for a thug—was paying them attention any longer. Once the effects of the adrenaline started fading, the pain of their injuries had surged up in full force. Just to keep them quiet, if nothing else, Victor had given them a powerful sedative. They were still conscious—sort of—but they were now half-reclined and pretty much oblivious to everything around them.

“Aren’t you worried—”

“That if you go straight from here to Steph’s boutique that’ll draw attention to them?” Victor shook his head. “Who cares where we go? If the Mesan police even noticed this fracas at all, they’ll have written it off as just another criminal incident in Lower Radomsko. The population density in the seccy quarters makes it impractical for the cops to maintain close surveillance. They just assume the crime bosses will keep a lid on things, and if they don’t the authorities will start breathing fire on
them,
not the small fry.”

He waved his hand at their surroundings. There were still some onlookers, but they were being very careful to keep a distance and a low profile. “The only gang controlling this area is the one we just took down. And I doubt they would have had the resources to follow you anyway. They certainly wouldn’t have had good enough tracking equipment, which means they’d have to follow you in person. And how likely is that?”

It was . . . close to impossible. Tailing a vehicle in a modern major city by eyesight alone required a large team of surveillance experts—emphasis on
large
and
expert.
There was probably no gang in Lower Radomsko who could have managed that. Even someone like Dusek would be hard-pressed unless he had plenty of advance notice.

She ran fingers through her hair. The sensation was strange. Thandi always kept her hair cut short, as soldiers usually did. Still, she’d had
some
hair. She was rather proud of it, in fact, although she’d never have admitted that to anyone. The albinism that was typical of modern Ndebelans sometimes resulted—as it had with her—in hair that was colored a brilliant platinum as well as being tightly curled.

Now, her hair was of a piece with the rest of her. Dull, drab, dreary. The only reason it wasn’t lank was because it was too short altogether. Colored a sort of icky gray-brown, it was less than two centimeters long except for an idiotic-looking pigtail that was apparently considered the height of fashion on her supposed home planet. (That was a Verge world by the name of Pezenec. Thandi had never been there—never been near it—but she’d spent hours studying the planet on their way to Mesa.)

“All right,” she said. “Where and when will we meet up again?” She didn’t ask him where he’d be going and what he’d be doing. That was need to know—which she didn’t.

“I’m not sure. It depends on this, that and the other. Within two days, though, unless something gets really tangled up.”

And with that, he opened the passenger door of the lorry and swung himself out of the cab. Once on the ground he took a few seconds to study the area nearby and then set off at a brisk pace toward one of the buildings to the rear.

Thandi didn’t wait to see where he was going. She started the lorry and keyed in the directions. That took no time at all, since it was the same directions she’d been following when the ambush happened.

Was there a word for an ambush gone badly wrong? she wondered. There damn well ought to be.

She thought about for a while, as the lorry made its way through the streets.

Slambush? Scrambush? Lamebush?

Eventually she settled on
ambust.

* * *

The man was one scary son of a bitch. But Hasrul’s mother was in bad shape now. He
had
to scrape up the money to get her the medicine she needed—and soon. He didn’t think Mama would last much longer if he didn’t.

“Oh, come on,” the man said. He leaned a shoulder against the wall of the building they were standing next to. But he didn’t put any real weight on it, and Hasrul was sure he could still spring into action in an split second.

“I’m almost insulted,” the man continued. “Do you really think I need to steal from someone like you?”

Hasrul hated to admit it, but the man had a point. His clothing didn’t qualify as rags, but give it a few more months and they might. Mama’s condition was draining every source of funds the family could get its hands on. There wasn’t much left for anything else except the bare necessities.

“I haven’t got the tools,” he protested. “Can’t afford them, neither.”

“I didn’t think you did and I didn’t think you could. So what?” The man cocked his head a little. “Are you going to tell me with a straight face that you don’t know who can do the work and does have the tools? If you do, you’ve insulted me twice and you’re getting onto thin ice.”

Hasrul ignored the implied threat. Sure, this guy was scary as hell, but he wasn’t the only scary son of a bitch around and Hasrul was used to threats. What did interest him was the man’s use of the word “ice.” Between that and the accent, Hasrul was now sure he was an offworlder. There wasn’t much ice on Mesa outside of refrigerating units and the polar ice caps.

Perhaps oddly, that reassured Hasrul. The truth was, some of the people in Lower Radomsko sure as hell
would
steal the clothing from a twelve-year-old boy—and cut his throat in the bargain. But he didn’t think someone who could afford the passage on a starship would bother.

“Yeah, sure, I know somebody. What do you want me to tell him? And what’s in it for me?”

The man hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing down the street. They were standing in the mouth of the alley, so the wrecked vehicles were still in sight. “Tell him I’ve got what’s left of one air car—pretty fancy one, too; it’s a Lecuyer 80 Zed Alpha—and two lorries. He’s welcome to cut them all up and sell what he can.”

One of the lorries was still undamaged. But Hasrul knew that cutting it up for parts was safer than trying to sell an unregistered vehicle. The police didn’t bother with checking vehicle registrations in Lower Radomsko, but if you went beyond those limits you might get into trouble. You were sure to get the registration checked if you went outside the seccy districts.

“What’s the split?” he asked.

“Seventy-thirty.”

“Which way?”

“He’s doing all the work. Seventy for him and thirty for me.”

“He’ll try to cheat you.”

“That’s a given. As long as he doesn’t get too greedy, I’ll look the other way.”

“And how will he know what’s too greedy and what isn’t?”

For the first time, a smile came to the man’s face. Now, he was a
really
scary son of a bitch. “He’ll know he crossed the line when he sees his brains on the ground. So you can tell him that I recommend he err on the side of caution.”

Hasrul wasn’t exactly sure what the word “err” meant, but the context made it clear enough.

And, again, he felt reassured. There was something completely relaxed about the way this man issued threats. They didn’t even seem like threats at all. Just . . . foresight. Predictions of what was sure to come. Not even old Bianka the fortune-teller could make something sound that certain.