Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“Ah, nah, babe. One batch came through, and some of the shit was bad. I got some tailored uppers though, good stuff.”

“Maybe. You maybe know somebody who has some of the army shit left? Or knows where it came from?”

He steps back. “Nobody. Nobody got any. Anybody got any not gonna sell it. Burned it if they’re smart. There’s some cop with a hard-on for anyone dealing it, I guess some other cop he was screwing got her head blown off.” A raucous laugh. “Teach her to fuck around in the North End. And word is the Razor says he’ll fry the balls of anybody he catches selling that shit. I know what’s good for me.”

He’s sidelit for a minute, gaunt pox-scarred cheeks and eyes like buttered rum, hair black as the moonlit river sleeked away from his forehead. Something must have showed in my face in the glow of headlights sweeping past, or maybe he knows who I am once he can see me, because he purses his lips and nods once, then turns away. He crosses the street by the waterless fountain with its statues supposed to represent the native peoples of the Northeast. Which include the Lakota, apparently, but then Europeans always have had trouble telling us apart.

I try to hook him back—“Ah. Sorry, man. Look, about the other stuff…”—and he just shakes his head and stalks away.

Made . Damn, and I’m not even a cop. I don’t know how I’m supposed to trace this shit back to a source when even a street-corner drug dealer won’t talk to me.

Goddamn.

And then the creak of leather and I turn as Razorface himself stops about ten feet away, waiting for me to notice him. He knows. He’s seen it happen. “Face.”

“Maker. Walk and talk with me.” He’s got seven or ten of his ducklings tonight, my targeting scope picking out weapons on every belt and up every sleeve. That’s four or five more than he usually travels with, and Emery, his right-hand man, is with them — all scarred nose and bulging eyes, pinched and wary as a hungry dog. On the far side, I recognize Whiny — Derek — and a gangster named Rasheed, whose momma raised him right.

I wonder if trouble’s afoot. Last time anybody got on Face’s bad side, 20-Love and Hammerhead blood got spread from here to East Hartford. I pull my hands out of my pockets, letting moonlight glitter on the scratched steel of the left one. “Bringing your friends?”

He shakes them off without looking at them and comes forward. I sense the little knot of dealers melting away behind me, jackals when the lion comes back to the kill. Emery moves toward them, hand in his jacket, just to be sure.

Razorface ducks down a little, speaking into my ear. “Whatcha doing out here at night, talking to trash?”

“Talking to trash,” I answer. I turn to walk alongside him, down to the bowl of a filthy little mud-choked lake. There’s an underground river in Hartford, the Park River. They buried it, back in the last century, after it flooded one time too many. Now it breaks the surface in a few places, and mostly runs through concrete channels underground.

Some places, you can still see phantom bridges, high arches the water doesn’t run under anymore. There’s one a few hundred yards west, in fact, ending the long sweep of lawn up to the wedding-cake-baroque Capitol Building. People sleep under it.

“He offer to sell you anything?”

“Nah.” I kick a rock out of the way. “Said you’d eat his balls with ketchup if he tried.”

“Good.” Moonlight shatters off steel teeth, gleams darkly on the oiled smoothness of his scalp. “Gonna answer my question, Maker?”

“Favor for a friend. No harm, no foul.”

He grunts and gives me an odd, hard kind of look. “Anything you wanna tell me?”

I shake my head. “I’m cool. I don’t think he wants his business spread around, is all.”

“All right, Maker. You mind that’s all it is, though. Things about to get ugly. I got maybe some little boys, think Razorface getting old and slow.”

“Funny that should happen just now, Face.”

“Yeah,” he says, clapping a hand on my shoulder roughly. It could be an endearment. It could be a warning. It’s probably both — Face didn’t get where he is by trusting anybody. He turns away. “Funny thing.”

Razorface turned back, frowning over his shoulder, watching Maker’s skinny form slink northward through the darkness. She probably parked at the train station. He let a breath roll out through his frustration and shook his head slowly, rubbing his jaw. “Derek.”

“Razor. My man.”

Don’t you forget it, little boy. I know you think I getting old, but I ain’t so old I can’t take your ass. Razorface peeled lips off a glinting smile and slid it up the kid and then over to Emery, who was strolling back down the hill, stride swinging. He gestured up the hill to the ornate white building at its crest, taking in the whole of the park, the hookers and the dealers and their clientele with a sweep of his hand. “You boys get this trash off my lawn.”

Ten Years Earlier:

1500 Hours, Thursday 15 February, 2052

Hellas Crater

Hellas Planitia

Mars

Valens watched excursion-suited Charlie Forster stop at the lip of the extensible, the xenobiologist’s right foot planted on its metal rim. Valens himself checked his glove and mask seals one final time, smiling when Forster snuck a glance over his shoulder. He knew the man was wondering if Valens was really in command of Scavella-Burrell Mars base, or if anybody but Unitek could really be said to be calling the shots. Money talks.

Bare overhead luminescence stung his eyes. Valens glanced around one last time, thinking how mundane the whole apparatus looked. Like a big gray vacuum cleaner hose. No different from a jetway, or the access tube leading into the Unitek-Brazil beanstalk from the bustling equatorial port. The Galapagos and Malaysian orbital elevators weren’t much different: a train station is a train station the world over, and beyond.

The differences lay before him. Beyond the improvised transparent atmosphere lock — just a foot or two ahead — he could make out the ragged outline of a hole torched in the hull of the alien vessel.

Valens took a breath of recycled air and stepped through the airtight film after Forster, broadside into a corridor like nothing he would expect a human engineer to design. Work lights on yellow cabling had been strung the length of the gangway, their steady light revealing curved, ribbed walls and floor mottled black and red like cocobolo wood. Charlie moved to one side to clear the lock, turning to watch Valens, who gestured him forward. “The bridge — what we think is the bridge — is on your left. Follow the lights.”

“What you think is the bridge?” Charlie stepped over a raised, gnarled ridge in the floor. Valens couldn’t tell if it was buckled plating or a design feature. “Haven’t the engineers looked the ship over yet?” The xenobiologist paused. “I’m walking on a starship, ” he said, and Valens felt a slow thrill run from his rubber soles to the crown of his head.

Concealed behind his breathmask, Valens saw Forster’s shoulders go up in delight and grinned himself. Like an idiot. And so what. This is an alien starship. He wanted to yank his gloves off and run his hands over the waxed-looking surface of the walls. “They have, briefly,” he said instead. “Of course we left everything that looked like biology to you. We’ve identified what we think are the engines. There’s some residual radiation; they’re set away from the ship on a shaft.”

Valens kept talking, giving Forster a few moments. The xenobiologist took advantage of the time to marvel at the low, knotty-looking ceilings. A seam or a spine of sorts ran down the center of the passageway, knobbed at regular lengths. “The front of the ship seems to have been largely destroyed, although the pilot’s skill must have been enviable. Both recovered craft were in very good shape, considering what you might expect a space vessel found planetside to look like.”