Even relaxed, resplendent in his shell suit and gold, leaning on his cane, McGurk still had an air of barely contained violence. His constantly moving, sparsely-haired jaw and eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep accentuated his cadaverous, weasel-like features. He was watching, bored, as two desperate young men beat the crap out of each other to the cheers of the surrounding crowd. It no longer even interested him, let alone excited him. It was just a taster for the real excitement. He glanced over at the Transit van parked in the corner.
‘Mr McGurk?’ Markus said. McGurk turned around. Markus was a solid, slab-like piece of meat and steroids with a shaved head and rings in either ear. He looked away as McGurk looked him in the eyes. McGurk liked that.
Markus had hold of some scruffy-looking ponytailed specimen who smelled of fear and low-level drug dealing.
‘I know your name,’ McGurk said in his thick Pompey accent, cockney two generations removed. Jaime wasn’t sure what to do except stare and try and control his fear. ‘Imagine how pissed off that makes me?’ McGurk continued. Jaime felt his bowels loosen. ‘I mean, you’re so down far down the food chain, Markus here wouldn’t bother with you, isn’t that right, Markus?’
‘No, Mr McGurk, I wouldn’t,’ Markus rumbled, playing his part in the pantomime. McGurk looked at the young man properly for the first time, taking in his bruised and cut face.
‘Someone give you a bit of a kicking?’ he asked. The kid nodded. ‘With knuckledusters by the look of it.’ The kid nodded again. ‘Who?’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘“Her”? What are you, fucking queer? You got beat up by a girl?’ McGurk laughed. It was the kind of laughter that Markus felt he should join in. Jaime just looked miserable. ‘Son, you don’t ever want to go to prison, let me assure you.’ Jaime just nodded miserably. He was so frightened he wanted to cry, but he was pretty sure that would be unacceptable. ‘So who is this girl with brass knuckles then?’
‘I don’t know her name, sir,’ Jaime started. McGurk turned to fix him with a stare. Jaime shut up, swallowed hard and pissed himself just a little bit.
‘But I know your name, yes? Give me something I can fucking use.’ This was punctuated by the flat hard sound of meat hitting meat.
‘She was looking for her sister. Talia, she was looking for Talia.’
‘What’d you tell her?’
‘That we’d gone out together for a while. That she liked gear. I’d binned her when I found her using H, and she liked to hang around with those emo arseholes who blew themselves up.’
‘That all?’ McGurk demanded. The fight was over. One of the combatants was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. The other was standing over him, not looking much better, gasping for breath.
Jaime nodded.
‘I swear, Mr McGurk, I didn’t know you had any interest.’
McGurk stared at him for a while. Jaime tried desperately not to piss himself further.
‘You know how I enforce loyalty?’ McGurk asked. Jaime swallowed, nodded and a wet stain started appearing on the front of his jeans. McGurk leaned towards him. ‘Imagine how I enforce silence.’ Jaime could smell the eucalyptus on McGurk’s warm breath. Jaime had his eyes closed tight. ‘You say nothing about this, nothing at all. You hear any more, you call Markus and tell him, understand?’ Jaime nodded, tears streaming down his face. ‘Get the fuck out of my sight.’
Jaime fled. McGurk watched him run out of the underground garage.
‘Find out,’ he said to Markus. Markus just nodded. McGurk turned to the winner of the bare-knuckle fight.
‘Brian, mate, you’ve made a bit of a mess here.’ Brian nodded, grinning savagely through the blood and the sweat. McGurk turned to Trevor, Markus’ counterpart muscle, who was standing over by the BMW, and nodded. Trevor leaned into the car, pulled out a briefcase and walked over to McGurk. Trevor opened the briefcase and showed Brian the neat rows of tens and twenties. ‘That’s ten thousand pounds, Brian. Do you want it?’ McGurk nodded to Markus, who started towards the Transit van.
‘Yes, Mr McGurk,’ Brian said, greed lighting up his eyes.
‘But how much do you want it?’
‘A lot, Mr McGurk.’
‘No holds barred with my man in the van, and I think he’s going to try very hard to kill you, yes?’ Brian looked nervous but nodded. ‘You don’t have to win, just fight.’ Brian looked unsure but his eyes kept flicking to the briefcase full of money. Finally Brian nodded. The crowd cheered.
‘Excellent!’ McGurk said, clapping Brian on the back.
‘Markus!’ Markus opened the back of the Transit. The van’s internal light spilled out of the back of the vehicle. Brian watched with mounting unease. Something shuffled into the light. Brian screamed.
13. A Long Time After the Loss
Vic was no stranger to seeing or causing death. When he had been in the Thunder Squads his job had been property damage on a massive scale. One squad was enough to bring entire city sectors to their knees. He had been involved in the destruction of starscrapers, watching the weight of the buildings tear their top floors out of stabilised geosynchronous orbit. Collateral damage to sentient biomass had been inevitable but that had been on conflict resolution worlds. Though he had to admit that some of the CR worlds had been newly designated and the new designation had come as a shock to the civilian populations.
As the hard-tech-augmented insect watched his partner cut open the front of his own skull with a beam saw, he decided that it wasn’t the number of people that Scab had killed on Arclight with the virus just to get away, it was the context and quality of the killing. The Queen’s Cartel had a lot of money. If they let them get away with what had happened on Arclight then the cartel would look weak and their competitors would assume that they were prey. Vic didn’t even want to think about the ramifications of killing a Church Militiaman.
Travelling through one of the conduits in the exotic gasses of Red Space, Vic had been searching all the comms traffic on the beacons they were in range of, looking for bounties going down on him and Scab. It was okay for Scab – he would make a pile of bodies of any who came after him – but Vic knew it wouldn’t be the same for him. Vic was probably one of the top bounty killers, but the guys who they would send after them were at least his match.
‘At least it will be over soon,’ he actually said out loud. Then he found Scab staring at him. Oh now you’re listening, Vic thought.
So far there had been nothing. This meant that someone with an awful lot of resources to throw at this problem was running interference for them. What worried Vic the most, however, was that whoever their mysterious patron was, they had found a way to sufficiently motivate Scab into this insanity.
And this new madness. Despite the Basilisk’s excellent life-support systems, the ship could not quite scrub the smell of burning bone and flesh out of the air. The argument had gone on for some time, but it hadn’t been much of an argument. It had mostly been Vic screaming at Scab. It was only after he had thought to do a scan of Scab that Vic realised that his partner had been listening to his favourite pre-Loss music on ancient crystal earrings. Scab preferred listening to music rather than downloading it directly into his cerebral cortex via his neunonics. He claimed it sounded better. Vic just thought it showed what a throwback Scab was.
Finally Vic had refused to help. He told Scab that he would have to slave him. Scab had said that he could not risk the drop in performance that came with slaving; Vic had to help him willingly. Scab’s idea of willingness was to slave Vic and put him in an agony immersion of his own design just long enough for Vic to agree. Despite his hard-tech augment, Vic had shaken for hours after Scab had let him out of the immersion – the things he’d seen, experienced, the things in Scab’s mind. Scab had only ever done something like it once before. Vic realised how important this was to Scab.