Met her five years back at a loading dock outside Echo City. I had delivered an item to a collector and had to celebrate with a few cocktails. Volga found me ten drinks and two centimeters deep in a pool of my own blood in an alley, mugged, cut, and left for dead by two local blackteeth. She carried me to a hospital and I paid her back with a ride to Luna, the one place she really wanted to go. Been following me around ever since. Teaching her the trade is my own little pet project.
Like me, she wears a black neoPlast suit to hide her thermal signature. She’s still holding the lid of the sarcophagus above my head in the gloom of the museum’s warehouse.
“You can stop showing off now,” I mutter.
“Do not be jealous, tiny man, that I can lift what you cannot lift.”
“Shhh. Don’t bark so damn loud.”
She winces. “Sorry. I thought Cyra turned off the security system.”
“Just shut up,” I say irritably. “Don’t skip in a minefield.” The old legion adage makes me feel even older than does the old ache in my right knee.
“Yes, boss.” She makes an embarrassed face and sets the stone down gently before extending a hand to lift me out. I groan. Even with the Z, I feel every drink and snort and puff of my forty-six years. I blame the legion for stealing a good quarter of them. The Rising for stealing three more before I wised up and split. And then myself for spending all the rest like there’d be more coming at the end of the rainbow.
I don’t need a mirror to tell me I’m the secondhand model of myself. I’ve got the telltale swollen face of a man who’s gone one too many rounds with the bottle, and a slight body even a decade in legion gravity gymnasiums couldn’t broaden.
I gather the green wrappers from my dinner of sirloin cubes and Venusian ginger seaweed and spray an aerosol can of blackmarket DNA into the sarcophagus before stuffing the can and the garbage into my backpack. Up goes my bodysuit’s facial hood and I motion to Volga to don hers. We find the other two members of my team past a stack of crates four meters high, crouched in front of the security door leading out of the warehouse.
“Top of the evening,” my team’s cat, Dano, a young, pimply Red, says without looking back. “Could hear your knees creaking from a hundred meters, Tinman. Need some street grease in them. I know a louse at a chop shop who’ll do you good.”
I ignore him and his Terran overfamiliarity.
I need more Lunese associates. Hell, I’d even take a grumpy Martian. Terrans are all such talkers.
My Green locksmith, Cyra, another Terran, is on a knee working the interior of the biometric lock. Her gear is set out on the floor near the door, where she’ll run support. Bit twitchy, that one. She doesn’t usually like coming to the dancefloor. I’ve hired Cyra sporadically over the past few years, but we’re not close. She’s like most Limies—petulant and selfish, with a processor in place of a heart. Especially nasty to Volga. Doesn’t bother me. I came to the conclusion at the age of nine that most people are liars, bastards, or just plain stupid. She’s a good hacker, and that’s all I care about. There’s few enough of them freelancing these days. Corporations, criminal and reputable alike, are gobbling up all the talent.
Both Cyra and Dano are short, and the only way to tell them apart in their hooded black bodysuits is the sizable paunch around Cyra’s midsection, that and the fact that Dano is doing the splits stretching for his part in the play, and humming an asinine Red ditty to himself.
I mind Dano less than Cyra. I’ve known him since he was a street rat fresh off the boat from Earth, pickpocketing on the Promenade with more acne on his face than hair in his head.
Cyra’s hands work the innards of the door, her left holding an output jack that transmits a wireless signal from the door to the hardware in her head. Two metal crescents packed with hardware and two hardline uplinks embedded in her skull run from her temples, over her ears, and back toward the base of her cranium. I see their bulge from underneath her thermal hood.
“Door alarm?” I ask, when she leans back from the door.
“Off, obviously,” she snaps, voice muffled through the hood. “The magnetic seal is dead.” She glances over at Volga, who has kneeled to unfold her compact assault rifle from its black case. “Planning to break your rule tonight, crow?”
“Wait, are we murder positive?” Dano asks eagerly.
“No. We’re not breaking any rules,” I reply. “But if chance strikes, the pale lady is my walking, talking insurance policy. You know what they say. Hell hath no fury like a woman packing a railgun.” Volga’s gloved hands assemble the black weapon. She pulls free three curved clips of ammunition and attaches them to the outside of her suit with bonding tape. Each clip is marked with a colored band coordinating with the type of projectile—venom paralytic, electrical disrupter, hallucinogenic round. Never killing rounds. Damn inconvenient having a killing-machine bodyguard who refuses to kill.
I’ve no such reservations. I touch the pistol on my own hip, making sure the leg holster is tight. Muscle reflex by this point. I look back at Cyra. “You going to make me ask about the rest of the alarms?”
“Limey couldn’t get all of ’em,” Dano says from the ground where he contorts his leg behind his head in a bizarre hamstring stretch.
“That right?”
“Yeah,” Cyra mutters.
Dano looks over at me, his face hidden behind the tight black plastic of his thermal. “Told you we shoulda hired Geratrix.”
“Geratrix is Syndicate now,” I mutter.
Dano bows his head in mock sorrow. “Another one for the bloody black.”
“It’s not my fault,” Cyra says in a low voice. “They updated their system. New protocols are government. Would take me near thirty minutes to punch in. Shit, it’d take a team of Republic astral hackers at least twelve—”
I hold up a hand. “Hear that?” I whisper. They listen. “That’s the sound of your take getting cut in half.”
“Half?”
“Half a job, half pay.”
Cyra’s got a temper on her as short as a tick’s tooth. Her hand drops to the multigun on her hip. Still, Volga takes one step toward her and Cyra looks like a kitten hearing thunder. I bend on a knee in front of the Green. “It’s not my fault…” she says. I take her chin through the mask and guide it so she’s looking at me.
“Calm down, and tell me the problem.” I snap my fingers. “Today, pissant.”
“I can’t access the Conquerors Exhibit systems,” she admits.
“At all?”
“It’s on an isolated server. Real relics in there, real security.”
I feel a spasm of annoyance in my left eyelid. Damn. Dano’s gonna have to do some acrobatics. “You know how I hate surprises, Cyra….”
“Told you we shoulda bought the gravBelts,” Dano says.
“Say ‘I told you we shoulda’ one more time. See what happens.” He meets my eyes, then glances down at the floor. Thought so. “Spider gloves are good enough,” I say. “Recyclers on.” Dano, Volga, and I pull our recyclers from our bags and strap them over our thermals’ mouth holes. “I trust you still have the doors figured….”