Planet Yurusaga-V of the Yurusaga Prosperity System
MegaBucks City
En route to The Pink Flamingo Casino
1235 GFST
03-01-09 GFSD
An almost half-block-long roller cruised along the main boulevard of MegaBucks City, black and gaudy and awful, even amid the neon signs of tokens, cocktails, and live nudes visually shouting for attention. It crawled without urgency or purpose in traffic except, perhaps, to be conspicuous. Even here on a planet celebrated for its libertinism, even here in a city legendary for its extravagance in debauchery, people on the street craned their heads to watch the sight of the magnificent luxury vehicle driven by a giant black exoskeleton, trimmed in red, and couldn't help but wonder what sort of person could be riding inside.
Mack Messer lounged in the backseat by himself, enjoying a bottle of very cheap wine poured into a much more expensive bottle ahead of time. Old habits died hard, and so did acquired tastes. The red UV-shades hid how much he'd enjoyed the acquired taste the night before, but he looked as dapper as possible in a jet black suit and blood red tie, now that he'd finished shaving the stubbly shadow off his chin.
"The thing is, Samus," he explained to his chauffeur, playing with his patch of graying temple, "the house always wins. And it's not even because the house cheats or has things rigged in its favor. Of course, that's true, too."
"Of course," Mack's personal armored bounty hunter, bodyguard and now assigned roller-navigator answered. Samus was well-dressed for their occasion but had apparently misunderstood Mack when he told him to come dressed in a suit, black and red, for the annual Dead Red financial meeting.
"Even when they win, even when they're up truckloads of money, they still manage to find some way to give it all back. Gambling isn't really an act of trying to win money; it's paying the price to have your money colorfully taken, with a sense of uncertainty for the how and when," Mack said.
"Suppose they don't, though," Samus asked. "What if they win especially, or do know when to quit?"
Mack laughed.
"Then that'd be unfortunate for them, wouldn't it?" Mack said. "Economics here are a delicate balance, you know. Can't let too much off-world. People could leave with casino tokens any time they want to, but they aren't worth much anywhere else. The Feds make sure of that."
"I see," Samus said, but didn't pursue it any further.
There was about a minute of silence before Samus asked something Mack assumed must have been on his mind for some time.
"I understand why you have to come to this meeting with the other underbosses, but I don't understand why I am here."
At this point Mack smiled, because he couldn't help himself — and also because if he didn't, Samus would ask him what was the matter. His powerful bounty hunter had a piercing sense of intuition, but not too piercing. Or, rather, only a certain kind of piercing.
"Well, as you may or may not know, the Xions have been managing to finagle their way into quite a few things, one of them being this valuable casino that until recently, was solidly Human-run property," Mack said. "They were successful. This is the last meeting before The Pink Flamingo gets turned over the Xigs for the next fiscal year."
"OK." Samus hesitated, and even though the voice continued to come out firm, Mack had learned the contours of the mechanical voice well enough by now, the bounty hunter may as well have been stuttering. "I apologize, but I still don't understand."
Mack realized Samus needed the hair of his ego ruffled a bit, as occasionally happened.
"Negotiations over some finer details should be, well, tense. I need someone I can count on to be there and do what needs done. So far, you haven't let me down yet. How many jobs is it now, 12?"
"14," Samus said.
"There you go. Plus however many for other Reds on the side. Anyway, you can see how you'd be an asset."
Mack took a swig of his faux luxurious wine, then wiped his mouth on a genuinely expensive towel folded over in the back of the seat in front of him. He always made sure to tell Samus truth; the bounty hunter could tell when he was lying, he'd found. But it wasn't quite mindreading, was it? Otherwise Mack would have been in real trouble.
"It's just that, the Xions don't like me, sir. In fact, I rather think they hate me," Samus said. "I don't see how I could do anything to help in negotiations."
"Hate you?" Mack guffawed. "Samus, they're afraid you. And what better negotiating tool than someone who makes the other side piss themselves? You're the damnedest thing. I love it."
Samus didn't ask anything more the rest of the ride. Mack didn't have ESP, but he thought he could feel Samus swell with something like pride.
It was going to be war soon, and he needed his best soldier kept happy.
The Pink Flamingo Casino
1300 GFST
The roller stopped next to the front steps, and Mack waited for his driver to come let him out. Samus did, and Mack thanked the bounty-hunter-turned-personal-assistant.
"Thank you Mr. Aran," Mack said. "You are a scholar and a gentleman."
Samus looked away, almost as if blushing
Mack began walking up the 30 or 40 steps between him and the doors, Samus a step and a half behind him. He could have used one of the automated lifts to get him there, and faster, but the walking did him good, and he needed to do more of it. After 40, the years came like cinderblocks. Dropped on the head.
At the top, a uniformed Human girl pulled one set of doors open for them, and Mack and Samus walked on through, with Samus pausing briefly to tip the girl. They could all have been automated or people could open doors for themselves. They could have, but the whole point of luxury wasn't your convenience, it was making sure someone else was inconvenienced.
Being inside the Pink Flamingo was almost hypnotic, pink and red mixed everywhere until it almost felt like being surrounded by flesh. The lights in the room shone low and hummed faintly until time no longer existed, and no one would have cared if it did.
The raised level circling the room contained the old-fashioned games, complete with actual people managing them, and nearly a fourth of the upper level was a bar, the only place you could spend your money and be guaranteed to win. Inside the lowered bowl, machines of every kind clumped into each other, with their lights and sounds competing for attention. Promising wealth and happiness, they showed their patrons visions of themselves in a brighter day. It was worth the cost to see one's dreams made tangible, if unfulfilled, and now more remote after the spent money.
Nothing was real on this level, nothing true except desperation, permeating everywhere along with the cigarette smoke. The people sucked in the cigarettes, burning it up with each breath, but it was an optical illusion, because really the cigarette was sucking them inside it. The machine mind commanded the person's arm to pull the level; it was the flesh that was mechanical.
For most people, this would be a pitiful scene, and maybe at another time in his life, it would have been for Mack as well. But for him now, it looked like money, a hundred-thousandth of a Yire making its circuitous path to his bank account. And so he rejoiced at the despondency.
"The meeting is upstairs," Mack said, glancing back at Samus, "but it's not for another hour or so. I have some business I need to take care of before then, but alone-like, yeah?"
Samus nodded.
"Is there anywhere in particular you'd like me to be, sir?"
"When I go in the lift, I want you with me, but until then, just stay in sight and out of trouble," Mack said.
Samus took a half-step and stopped.
"That's usually easier said than done for me," Samus said.
Mack sighed. He started across the room to a nearly empty Redjack table in the corner and stopped behind the chair of a dark-haired Human man, who looked to be in his early-30s.
Despite having a massive bet in front of him, the Human looked like he was about to fall asleep on the table. There were four cards so far, and the three showing totaled 17. The man sluggishly tapped the table, and the dealer, who had an ace showing, shakily drew a card and pushed it toward him. It was a three of clubs. The man sighed and turned over his last card: the ace of diamonds. The dealer looked quite relieved and revealed a nine of hearts for herself, then dealt one more card and busted. While this transpired, Mack sat down beside him at one of the empty chairs.
"I don't even understand how you can enjoy playing when you know the outcome already. Not really gambling anymore, is it?"
Grado Landon finally stopped arranging his tokens and tossed about a third of them to the dealer. She caught them in mid-air and almost cried while thanking him, then rushed for the front door. Grado swung his gaze to meet Mack's face; the eyes of the casino's daily operations chief had the dead of circuitry in them, and Mack repressed a smile remembering the story of how they'd been lost.
"The gamble was on whether she could make me win without me noticing how," Grado said. "I said she couldn't, so she won the bet. The tip was her severance pay."
"That's a hell of a thing," Mack snorted. The tokens she'd left with were a good year's salary for most people. "And if she'd lost?"
"I'd have kept her on until the Xions took over, and they'd have flayed her alive," Grado said, standing up from the table. "They probably still will, but I wanted them to at least have to work for it."
"Aw," Mack said, realizing the casino boss's lie. "You sweetheart Grado."
"Ain't I just." Grado coughed. "I'm thirsty. You?"
"A little."
They walked toward the bar and the energy for conversation was spent instead on walking. Mack saw Samus peering over someone's shoulder at a nearby poker table.
"—actually just the opposite," Samus was saying. "You made a terrible bet, but you're going to win the hand. And if the dealer distributes cards the way she did last time, you'll probably—"
"Samus," Mack whispered, too quietly for even Grado to hear, but sure enough the bounty hunter stopped talking. "Leave the customers alone and let them lose in peace."
Samus made a small bow and left the table, heading toward the lower deck. About the same time, Mack and Grado sat down on two stools at the bar, and Mack turned his attention back to more important things.
"Are the circumstances for that game you just played with the girl worth telling me about?" Mack asked.
"I don't think so. No, on second thought, it actually may come up later." Grado ordered two vodka sours, and Mack thanked him for his generosity. "Some guy came by the other day, took us for 50 million."
Mack laughed, but Grado didn't.
"No, you heard right. He actually won more than that, but he kept throwing money around, tipping dealers, servers, other gamblers. He gave that girl," Grado pointed toward the exit, "more money than some of the rest, which we seized of course. We'd told her ahead of time that if she didn't make sure he lost, she was going to be in a bad way. She understood and promised he wouldn't take a hand. He still won." The bartender handed them their drinks. "Lucky bastard won everything. We couldn't kick him out because everyone was watching what was going on, people coming in off the street just to cheer him on. Anyway, I wanted to see if that girl is less than advertised, but turns out she is that good. My eyes barely follow her. And she got took all night by some drunk old bum. Everybody here did."
Mack's lips nibbled the edge of the glass.
"How'd he manage to get away with cheating that much?"
"That's just the thing," Grado said, draining half his cup. "I got no idea. We got him so drunk he couldn't walk, and still he'd call out from the floor, 'Hit me!' and win. He's done this before. Not this much, but the same way. A few years back, he came through here, couldn't lose a Yire if he was getting paid to do it. I watched the viddies. It was the same as this time. Nobody could catch where he pulled the con. But just last month, he probably lost fifty-kay on the 50 Yire slots. For eight hours, I mean, he didn't hit nothing."
Out of the corner of his eye, Mack caught Samus talking to an old woman. The bounty hunter stopped her from using the last token in her hand on one of the 20 Yire slot machines and pointed his finger at another a few seats down.
"Huh," Mack said. He turned his focus back to the table. "So you know who he is then?"
"By name, yeah. Something Lopes." Grado pulled a portable display out of his pocket and opened it. There was a grainy holovid face and under it the name "João Lopes" spelled out. "Otherwise he's a nobody."
"You mind if I keep this?" Mack said. Grado waved it off, and Mack put the display in his own pocket.
"Honestly, I wouldn't care at all if those damn Xigs weren't taking over," Grado said. He finished his glass and immediately ordered two more. "Usually we'd just wait to recover from it. Two, three months down the road, and we're back where we were or better. Now we can't pay out hardly anything else without it looking like we've taken a huge loss this fiscal year. All the payout probabilities are way down."
The old woman shrieked and waved her hands in the air as tokens piled at her feet up to her waist. Wisely, Samus was nowhere to be found. Grado didn't appear to pay attention to any of the commotion.
"None of that stuff changes anything, it just makes it worse. This is the start of something big with those fuckers, I know it. First, the Xions muscled their way into our casino, mycasino, now they're raising a stink about that accountant business to force me and all of us even more out of the way. They're looking to take over the whole operation."
"Nah, I wouldn't worry," Mack said, focusing back on the glass in his hand and man beside him. "I was never for poking the dragon on federal taxes, but that's over and done with. The Xions? They're flexing now, is all."
"I don't know," Grado Landon said, wiping dried spit from the sides of his mouth. "The Boss isn't going to last forever."
"He'll outlive us both, you watch."
"No, Mack, really. He hasn't got much longer, and everyone knows it."
"So you're a doctor now, huh?"
"In this case, sort of." Grado gave the bartender a look, and she knew to get out of earshot for a while. "I came across the result of his last examination."
"You went looking and stole a peek at his files, you mean."
"I mean what I mean. My point is, the doctors don't think it looks good. They've done just about everything to get him this far, and it's cell death. If he doesn't go to the Central Planets to get worked on, he's done."
"How you mean?"
"Six months, on the outside."
"And you're saying the Xions know about it, too?"
"I don't think so, no," Grado said. "But they can figure it out generally, same as everybody."
The two of them sat in silence for some time.
"Who else have you told what you found out?" Mack asked.
"Just you so far."
"Good."
"There's a few others I trust, all Human. Everyone hates Xigs, but they may not like us much better."
"Yeah, yeah. Smart thinking."
"Before I can go any further," Grado whispered, "I need to know that you'll be behind me when the time for the shakeup happens, no hesitation."
Mack took a moment to finish the last of his drink.
"Of course. Of course I will."
"When we see what we've got, we can go from there," Grado said. "You're my right-hand man in this."
Mack nodded and let that settle.
"One word of advice for moving forward, then," Mack began, "don't start playing nice with the Xions all of a sudden. I know you probably want to lull them into a false sense of security, but you haven't dealt with them as long as I have. Not only could it make them suspicious, but they'll get bolder. The only things those mouth-breathing thugs understand is power, so any time they push, we have to push back and make them think twice about taking us on. That meeting upstairs is the first step. Don't bend over and let them ream you about anything. I mean anything."
"Yeah, OK. That makes sense. When it comes to backstabbing, there's nobody I trust more than Mack Messer." Grado finished his third drink. "Tell me, do you still carry around your old knife?"
Mack shrugged.
"I wouldn't remember how to use it anymore anyway."
The Pink Flamingo Casino
1335 GFST
Samus's Internal Processing Unit had reserved awareness to keep track of Mack since they'd parted ways, and when it saw him stand up and head for the lift, the IPU let her know. Samus acknowledged the signal within the suit, and outwardly tried to finish enlightening the more than slightly drunk woman in her late 20s leaning against a nearby pillar about the nature of statistics.
"No, no, the more you play, the more money you're likely to lose in the long run," Samus said. "So if you really want to provide for your children, the best thing to do is not gamble, and eventually the money you don't spend in the casino will add up—gradually—to a sort of jackpot on its own. You see?"
The woman nodded, but had slid down the pillar and was now sitting on the floor in her purple skirt. It matched her hair, and Samus wondered if the woman had planned that.
"You're smart," she screeched in a remarkably high pitched voice, scratching her eyebrow and smearing the top layer of makeup. "You look strong. I need someone to take me home."
"I'll call you a taxi."
"No, please. I don't want to go home alone tonight." The woman looked like she was about to cry. "I'll show you a good time. Just ;et me get you out of that big, sweaty power suit first."
"Thank you, but the temperature regulator is working fine," Samus said. "And I have to go."
Samus walked as quickly and casually as she could to the lift where Mack was waiting for her, and with him a small crowd of people also waiting for the lift to arrive. The tone chimed, the doors opened, and Mack stepped in first, turning back toward the crowd with a hand out.
"This is a private ride," Mack smirked, nodding toward Samus.
She took the hint and stepped forward, ducking slightly so not to bump her head. People took her a lot less seriously when she forgot to do that. Samus grabbed a small Wy'dan child…(?) And gently dropped… her(?) back outside the doorway, then stood and crossed her arms.
(At the edge of her vision, her IPU clarified that it was an adult Wyd'an, and their sex characteristics were too complicated for binary linguistic classification.)
Everyone else planning to get in with them suddenly stopped and took a step back. Samus went in by herself, then turned around and pointed a finger upward.
"Weight limits," she said, and she saw everyone nod and resume normal breathing as the doors closed.
"I have a new job for you," Mack said behind her as she felt the rush of acceleration. "Forget the bodyguard stuff. I have a name and face. I need you get the person and bring him back here."
Samus turned to face him and saw a strange look on his face. The usual playfulness was gone, replaced with something hard and cold.
"I admit," Samus said, "I'm relieved to get out and about, but this all seems quite abrupt, sir. What is going on?"
"Samus, you know how when I offer you a bounty, you always ask a bunch of questions, and then I answer all of your questions before you accept?"
"Yes."
"This isn't one of those times." Mack handed her a small holovid displayer as the door opened again for the top floor conference hall. "Take a look at it when you get outside. He's apparently somewhere in the city, and that's all I know. For anyone else, what I'm asking is impossible. Because it's you, I'm asking you to find him in six hours. I need him by tonight."
"I'll do my best, sir," Samus said. She wondered if he could hear her heart pounding.
"Then I'm not worried," Mack said. Her IPU confirmed he wasn't. He stepped out and left her alone in the lift.
"Tonight," he repeated once more before the doors closed behind him.
MegaBucks City
1440 GFST
Even before she'd gotten out of the lift, her suit was combing all of the public and easily accessible not-so-public electronic databases on the local Lattice. Her sense of fatalism was not surprised when, by the time she left the casino, it had searched them all, and found nothing to go on. That left other, more time-consuming tactics.
Samus projected Lopes's face out of the back of her hand, about twice as large as actual-size and four meters in the air, as she walked down the crowded sideway cold-calling his name in the burdened air.
"João Lopes. João Lopes."
Even for her it felt blunt and artless, but time she spent thinking of a better plan was time wasted. Plus, she wasn't really looking for Lopes himself. Chances of that were slim. (She stopped her IPU from calculating the precise odds and made sure it was focused on scanning the crowd.) But finding someone who recognized face or name, even in a city of this size, wasn't totally ridiculous. Samus just had to provoke a reaction her suit could pick up on, and the longer she did, the more people she could try out, and the more inevitable finding someone with a connection to Lopes would become.
But an hour later, it seemed much less inevitable than when she started and Samus was mentally playing out all of the scenarios for herself and her future with the Dead Reds if she failed to find this bounty. Surprisingly, she found not all of them were bad. She'd had a good run, and was well-set-up to freelance again. At least, this is what she told herself.
She was flailing now, and she knew it. Finding Lopes was inevitable (it wasn't, but again, it built her confidence to say so). By way of loophole, she reconciled the two competing opinions with the compromise that finding him was more or less inevitable, but meeting Mack's deadline wasn't. He wouldn't care for excuses, even legitimate ones.
Then her suit picked up someone looking a little longer at the face than he should have, then her IPU showed her the memory section of the fellow's brain was firing off, and thenSamus knew she found her first lead.
As it turned out, that guy didn't know much of anything. But, he did remember that Lopes had once picked up his tab at a bar a few years ago (the bar had closed and reopened twice in the meantime), and more recently he'd seen Lopes begging for scrap Fisks at a nearby street corner a few blocks over. So the man with the exceptional memory had recognized Lopes and given him a 100 Yire Fisk, but that was more than a month ago. Samus thanked the man for being so forthcoming, set him down, and went in the direction he'd given her.
At the street corner, Samus met a Sylvan prostitute who said she'd met Lopes and talked to him a while until her Vidian pimp had caught wind of it and smacked them both around a little for wasting so much time. Her pimp was nowhere to be found while she stood talking to Samus, for some reason, which disappointed her. In any case, the prostitute said Lopes's old lady went by the name of Sandra and lived in the apartment complex under the XXXenophile on 86th Street.
(4684 E. 86th St., Samus's suit specified, after checking a directory.)
But when Samus got there, the landlord said nobody by the name of Sandra had ever lived there as far as he knew. He was lying, and after Samus expressed her disapproval in fairly direct forceful tones, the landlord admitted that he'd kicked Sandra Bhudia out a week ago for not paying her rent. Apparently she and Lopes were no longer together, and without Lopes's occasional bursts of inexplicable prosperity, she couldn't afford the flat on her own anymore. He said he didn't know where she'd gone, but if it was Lopes that Samus was looking for, the best places to check would be bars, liquor stores, and gutters, and not necessarily in that order.
The landlord thought this was very funny; Samus less so. She still thanked him and headed back to try to find the prostitute again, but since the woman wasn't at the same street corner, Samus was out of leads altogether.
Shallah.
A green light began to beep at the corner of her Heads Up Display.
"Samus, can you talk?" scrolled across. It was Mack.
"I can talk," Samus answered via audio. She could fake a visual to go along with it, but Mack had gotten used to just hearing from her. "Is something the matter?"
"Yes, and no," Mack said. "Grado, my dear old friend, went and got himself killed."
"What happened? Are you all right?" Samus began to map out the quickest route back to the casino.
Mack laughed at her; she realized her concern had been misplaced — and too transparent.
"I'm surrounded by a lot of mean looking guys with pulse rifles, but they're looking out for me, not looking for me," Mack said. "Turns out Grado bowed up against the wrong Xigs in our financial meeting, and they caught him in the bathroom a little while later. Caught his bodyguard with his pants down, and shot Grado in the chest on the head."
Samus's IPU reminded her "head" was slang for toilet, and she was puzzled by her boss's flippancy.
"Anyway," Mack continued, "everybody heard the gunshots ring out, and next thing we saw two Xions running out of the bathroom, so all my guys gunned them down when they wouldn't surrender. Terrible mess, all of it. But not without its opportunities."
Samus' mouth tasted of bile.
"Mack, did you have something to do with this?"
He raised an eyebrow.
"Now Samus, you know my rule about not asking questions you don't want the answers to. Plausible deniability is a vastly underrated gift. The important thing as far as you and I and anyone else is concerned is that Grado had a very public fight and ended up getting killed, apparently by those same people, and it looks like there's about to be a war."
"So do I need to come back in?"
"No, you need to find Lopes and bring him back so we can save some face in whole clusterfuck. The Xions want in, they want us out — by out I mean dead — and I need to show everybody else Humans aren't as completely weak and incompetent as Grado has made us out to be."
"That isn't the real reason."
"It's reason enough for you, though, isn't it?" Mack said, pointedly. "The bottom line is things have changed, but not for you. So where are you at on your end of this whole deal?"
"I'm… close," Samus said.
"Just what I like to hear. I don't expect to have to contact you again in the next few hours, so the next time I hear from you, I want Lopes slung over your shoulder, got me?"
"Yes sir."
The connection cut out and Samus was left standing on the street corner, trying to remember why she needed to catch up with that missing whore.
Instead, she thought some more about what the landlord had said and asked her IPU how many liquor stores or bars it could call for her, asking about Lopes. It said it could call about seven at once, depending on how intricate the conversations got to be, and even that would mean risking Turing test failure. Samus gambled that if Lopes had money again, he'd be going into bars and celebrating still. She told it to use a young, flirty-sounding Human female voice (not her own) and say something about Lopes having bought her a drink recently at the bar.
Unfortunately, Megabucks had about 600 bars, and half again as many liquor stores. It might take her up to 30 seconds for each conversation to fully determine whether Lopes was familiar or not. She hoped the pretty voice would cover for any artificiality in the actual conversations, and had the IPU start calling up bars and liquors stores at a ratio of 5 to 2. For the first time in a while, her Internal Processing Unit got a chance to really stretch itself. She couldn't remember the last time the coolant system had had to kick on for the processors, and now she noticed her walking starting to get herky-jerky. Having no real idea where she was going yet, she sat herself down in an alley, turned off some unnecessary functions, and tilted her head back to rest.
A Human bum nearby woke and sat up quickly. His clothes, yellow with dried sweat, were soaked with something wet now, but luckily Samus's IPU was too busy to run a chemical analysis.
"My eyeballs are floating," the man mumbled from behind a dilapidated and incomplete set of teeth.
"My beak is broken and worn," Samus said absentmindedly. "It grinds and scrapes, almost to dust."
"You're a girl! By the Master, how young are you?" the man exclaimed, and Samus remembered she'd switched her voxcoder off. She swore in her head, but didn't bother to turn it back on.
"Have you ever heard of João Lopes?" Samus asked, ignoring his own question. She stole some processing power to display the holovid face. Four kilometers away, the manager of a liquor store furrowed her brow listening to the voice of a young woman who ended all of her questions in a lower pitch than what she'd started.
"Never in my life," the man answered, honestly.
Samus grunted as response. He looked her up and down, licking his lips compulsively, and Samus had vague dread about what the man's next words would be.
"Miss, a well-to-do lady like you wouldn't be able to spare a Yire or two on a down on his luck old gambler, would you?"
She cocked her head to the side as an idea came to her. Samus stopped her suit from beginning new calls and reached into the compartment of petty Fisks. Drawing out a card that read 100 Yire, she tossed it over to him.
He caught it and immediately began thanking her.
"Oh miss, thank you so much. I'm so hungry."
Her IPU ran a brief medical diagnosis and saw that was literally true, but not as he was intending it. As she'd assumed.
"For me, you look more thirsty than hungry," Samus said, standing up. "Where is the best place to get drunk around on the cheap?"
"That all sorta depends," the bum said. He took a few moments to consider. "Now, for malt liquor, store brand Pop-N-Go is good. For straight liquor, Pinky's has about everything you need, but Ruel's will get you furthest on the least. If you're feeling social, you go over to Grant's, but it's the Orange Moon that knows how to treat a feller right."
Her IPU looked up each store and began making calls.
"Wait, are you the girl who talked to João from two nights ago?" she heard her IPU patch one bartender through, a moment later.
Samus tossed the bum another Yire, this one 2,000.
"Drown your eyeballs tonight, old man," Samus said, walking out of the alley.
And she was on her way.
The Orange Moon
1810 GFST
Samus walked in and saw that The Orange Moon was not very busy. Tables were empty, a few pool hounds of various races hovered over the billiards, and a ropey old Human lady sat in front of the single video slot machine. The bartender had nothing to do but clean dirty glasses in optimistic preparation for a rush. Well, it was still early yet.
Samus went up to the bar and stood, distrusting the stools. Beside her sat a Jorg in a thick overcoat and a Solifugue, nude but for his wings, discussing the effect of the local climate on their glands, in some variation of High Carapacean. Samus let her IPU work on figuring it out, as a reward for finding this place.
"Fenner Hasan," Samus said, reading the bartender's registration documents.
"Yes," the man said, setting down the most recent empty glass. "Can I help you, sir?"
"I'm looking to speak with João Lopes. What do you know about him?"
Hasan's eyes narrowed at the mention.
"You're the second person to ask me about him the past 20 minutes. What do you have to do with the girl who just called here?"
"A mutual friend. I was hoping she could help me, but you ended the conversation with her rather abruptly didn't you?"
Hasan took a measured look at Samus.
"No one calls up here two days after to thank a greasy old drunk for giving her cash, especially not a woman like that." He scratched his short beard at the chin as his eyes kept darting to the front door and back to Samus. "You're with the casino, aren't you? A Dead Red."
"Yes," Samus answered. In her current capacity, it was for all intents and purposes true.
"You're too late. He spent almost all of his money, and got mugged for the rest," Hasan said, shrugging. "He's dead. Sorry."
Samus's IPU noted the Jorg to her right had taken a sudden interest in their conversation. The suit also noticed Hasan was lying, at least partially.
"He isn't dead, but if you don't want to be, it's in your best interest not to be dishonest with me." Samus said the statement coldly. Through her voxcoder, it sounded absolutely deadly. Of course if she told her employers about it, it probably would be.
She decided honesty was the best tactic for her as well.
"There's not much you can do to help Lopes now. He should not have won so much money from the sort of people I work for. You can't help him, but you can help yourself. We won't be able to track down every place in town he spent their money. I don't have to let them know he spent some, apparently a lot of it, here. Because they will come soon, and they will want interest when they do."
Hasan considered for about half a minute, then sighed, and told her the whole thing. The Orange Moon had been the last hop on a multi-day binge and he'd picked up the tab of everyone he could get his hands on, especially there. Then he'd left, broke or nearly so, wandered a couple of blocks, and gotten jumped for whatever little he had left, plus several broken bones.
"He got emergency treatment and sent somewhere else, I really don't know," Hasan said. "If he couldn't pay for anything, he's as likely to have gotten dumped out into the street as anywhere. That's the truth."
"I need better than that," Samus warned.
"They probably sent him to the clinic," the woman at the slot machine said, continuing to play. "The Merichane Clinic. That's where I go when I need to loan organs or get medicine."
"Why would he be there?"
"It's run by Kathliks. They don't want money, just souls," the woman said. She didn't smile. "The clinic took care of that guy who got stabbed at Oblique across the way, didn't they Fenn?"
Hasan didn't say anything, but Samus checked and saw it was easily the closest free clinic around. If it hadn't been dumped into the street, or handed over to the morgue, he'd likely be there.
"Thank you," Samus said to the woman, then again to Hasan, who cursed. She ran as quickly as she could, swerving through people, rollers, street signs; quickly as she could was very fast indeed. Lopes had to be there. She willed it so.
The clinic building was large but sprawling squat, and white, or the color white turns in the tropics when no one has bothered to repaint it in at least 10 years. Going in through the wide automatic doors, she found an emergency waiting room full of people groaning and waiting for care they would not get for several more hours, if at all. A nurse in a white pantsuit with a red cross down the middle told her she'd have to take a number and wait, and Samus let her know that would not be possible.
"Federal rights," she said, and gave the nurse her registration number.
The nurse frowned but Samus was let to go through the double doors to the healthcare auditorium. The groaning was worse here. As Samus's IPU scanned the row after row of stained bedsheets and charts, she wondered if this was the place people came to get help or to die. She noted that she didn't have much time left, but as she walked down the aisles, couldn't help but jack in to one of the electronic charts and start correcting diagnoses. For all the good it would do.
"What are you doing?" the nurse asked.
"I'm trying to find my bounty without wasting any more of your time," Samus said. That was also true.
Before long, she found him. At the end of a long row, of course, as everything about this had been.
"Excuse me," Samus said, and began walking toward it. She was there before long, staring down at the skinny man with cirrhosis, jaundice, a broken wrist, fibula and punctured lung, along with a severe concussion. His breathing machine kept the silence from becoming too awkward as she watched him. Finally she called.
"Tell me you have good news, Samus."
"I do. I've found Lopes."
Megabucks City
1930 GFST
Behind the clinic in the path leading to the skyport, Samus stood with Mack as they watched the orderlies lift a gurney carrying the unconscious Lopes towards his pursuers. He and Samus were the only thing between him and a spacecraft packed full of Xions.
Mack had just seen the damage on Lopes for the first time, and he nodded a little before starting to speak.
"You did good, Samus. You found a nobody in a packed city in a few hours. Now everyone knows no one can hide from us — from you — for long, and no one can get away with any insult. It looks better that you brought him in this way, really." Mack snorted. "You know, one time, your old buddy Mr. Yomo got a contract based on my recommendation. He was supposed to snuff some asshole on his way to work. Next day I hear the guy was found hugging a viewscreen in the bathtub, fried all to hell but no signs of lacerations or forced entry or foul play.
"I said, 'Revlen, that's amazing! How'd you pull it off to look like a suicide?' And then he told me he'd been waiting in a roller outside all that night and morning, and fell asleep until the platform security showed up. Turns out the guy's fiancé was sleeping around on him and he'd found out the night before. 'Course, like an idiot I let Revlen take credit and get paid. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. But luck catches up with you eventually."
Mack watched the orderlies roll the unconscious gambler towards them. They stopped momentarily, and nodded towards Mack. He walked up beside Lopes, and reached for something inside of his own pocket. Samus stared as Mack placed a very small, very dangerous device in Lopes's open hand and closed a fist around it. Then Mack nodded, and the orderlies resumed pushing the gurney up the narrow ramp to the waiting spacecraft.
"Sir, what are you doing?" Samus finally asked.
"He's unconscious now. When he wakes up, or even before, those Xigs are going to do things to him that can't even be properly imagined by someone who hasn't seen it."
As if proving his point, some of the younger Xions began to whoop at the sight of their prize, strapped down and coming to join them.
"If I was him," Mack mused aloud, "I don't think I'd be looking forward to waking up."
"Mack, sir, I understand that, but—"
"Samus, we're about to take back the Dead Reds and remold it in our image. Isn't that what you want?"
"Yes."
"To do that, we're going to have to get rid of a lot of the stupid, brutish parts." He sighed and turned to look at her. "I can't do it without you, but I'm going to try anyway. Will you help me?"
"They'll know it's you that did this," Samus said after a long pause.
"Yes," he answered immediately. "And with you with me, they'll know I can get them anywhere, in any way I like."
They stood quietly for a few minutes.
"I'm with you," Samus whispered. It sounded bolder when Mack heard it.
Finally, the ship lifted off of the ground and got about 30 meters in the air cohesively before its pieces abruptly decided to go separately in every direction due to the suggestion of a fairly persuasive and quite large explosion that had appeared inside it.
"Good," Mack said as scraps and burning metal rained down around them. "We've got a lot of work ahead of us."
~See You Next Mission~
The secret to happiness is to find something you love doing and con someone into paying you to do it. Manage that, and you'll never work a day in your life.
Next brief: Blood Money