The Clarity of Cold Steel

SABLE’S DEAD WHEN I start reloading. But she was dead before that, too, and in a fair-serious manner. I take in Mac Heath’s surgical quarters; the place is a shambles. Chairs overturned. Blood spattered. Her difference engine’s tooled wide open. Shining sharp surgical utensils glitter across the floor like a stainless-steel viper’s den.

A Maori warrior’s sitting in the corner looking like a scarecrow with his stuffing kicked out, legs and arms splayed wide, his face and neck all quilled through red with fletches. I riddled him something awful. A half dozen broadheads from close range. The ones that missed are stippled around his head in the wall.

Sable’s lying across the surgical table, the brass side of her face all stoved in by what must have been a cacophony of hammer blows. It’s matte-dull with drying crimson. The other half’s no better. One eye stares wide, out of its socket, blood red, horrid. Above deck, the fighting’s nearly at an end. Feet stomp, muffled high above. Men growling like wild animals. Someone shouts an epithet which is abruptly cut off. I doff my great coat and cover Sable cause it’s awful, and though there are things I can stand, this ain’t one of them. I hear a wet noise from the corner, a slurp, a sniffle, a scrape. I finish reloading, spin the housing of my gun whizzing, turn, level it.

“You…?” slurs a voice, all chopped and bothered, practically unintelligible. Mac Heath’s in the corner, hands bound behind her back to a brass pump riveted from floor to joist. Her jaw’s busted but good. It looks like she’s hiding an apricot her cheek; fistfuls of hair’ve been torn out of her head and dried blood’s tattooed across her bruised face. She’s not broken, though, I can see that in her eyes. Bent maybe, warped, but not broken. She sits up as best she can, wobbling, one leg kicking, trying for purchase on the slick hardwood.

“A dok’s on the way,” I say. What I don’t say is it won’t do Sable a lick of good.

Someone above screams a blood-curdling wail that dies off long and somber.

Men chant, stomp, laugh, all muted.

Mac Heath’s green eyes quiver with hatred. She spits blood, a tooth, closes her eyes, breathes.

“Listen,” I say, kneeling by her side. “Apologies, but the deal goes like this.” I draw a bundi dagger from inside my greatcoat. “You run your business as usual. Fifty percent goes to the gentleman top-deck whose name roughly translated means, ’He Who Greets with Fire.’” I nod to her. “He’s a stern chap. Very serious. Very Zulu. His name is apropos.”

“Fuck,” with a half shrug, she wipes bloody drool on her own shoulder, “you.”

“I think you should be pleased with the fifty.” Something wet seeps down the side of my head. I slip a finger through it, take a gander. Blood. Mac Heath doesn’t offer to patch me up. “The chief, he drove a hard bargain.” I hold my hands out in florid explanation.

“You did this, aye?” she snarls, she slurs, she demands.

I think on it a moment. “No. Just vulturing the corpse.”

Her eyes quiver in fury.

“You want vengeance?” I snap out a handkerchief, press it to my head. I’m bleeding pretty good. Don’t know from what. “Well, I might be able to arrange something.” I glance up as feet pound above. “Had that very thought in mind.”

Mac Heath’s eyes narrow.

Men yell from above as I reach round her slim frame. “Pardon.” She recoils as I feel along her arms, behind her, to the rope binding her wrists, and slit them with my blade. “The initial deal fell through.” I stand up, offer her a bloody hand.

Deftly, she ignores it, rises stiffly, legs wobbling, her gaze riveted to the lump underneath my greatcoat, sprawled across the surgical table.

“Luckily, I had a safety net in place. Foresight.” I tap my temple with my index finger. “And thus, you and I are both still breathing.”

“They’re all dead?” She rubs her stigmataed wrists, all raw with red. Not much sound now from above, not so much as a scuffle. The Zulus operate shoeless, even in winter. Don’t ask me how. You can barely hear their tread on the deck. One of the first things I noticed when they came to me, all those silent giants humping along over deck thoroughbred-swift, on you before you can blink.

“The Zulus had the numbers and they had the drop.” Without conscious thought or will we both drift to stand over Sable’s broken form. “And they had me.” A pauper’s service for the glorious paramour: gumshoe and gut-slinger holding vigil and neither one of us whole in body, mind, or soul.

“And what is it you offered?”

“Intelligence. Troop strengths. Placement. Weapon systems, which in this case happened to be mostly stone clubs. Meres, they’re called. Fearsome at close quarters, bash and stab, but archaic even as medieval weaponry goes. And against a phalanx toting eight-foot steel spears tricked out with ten-gauge bang-sticks?” I shrug, glance at the quiet above. “Anyways, it’s over now.”

“You mentioned a deal, aye?” Mac Heath whispers.

“She was very beautiful,” I say, following her gaze to the misshapen lump beneath my coat.

“Aye.” Mac Heath nods, staring numbly.

“I need to know about Gortham,” I say. “I need to know everything, savvy?”

“And what do I get?” She crosses her arms, winces.

“You’re still breathing, ain’t you?”

“Maybe that’s not enough.”

“Greedy girl.” I don’t blame her, though; I’d want more, too, but then, I always want more. “But I made an arrangement.” A personality flaw. “I asked the chief to keep one Maori alive and in relatively unspoiled condition. Relative compared to his gangmates, anyways. You tell me everything you know and he’s yours.”

“How do I know there’s any still alive up there?”

“Chief seems rather the meticulous sort with regard to honoring his word. Course, killing gangsters ain’t a scripted show.” I draw out a data-board I palmed off the table of a Port City mushroom grocer, brandish it between two fingers. It looks exactly like the stack off Chirag’s desk. “Know what this is?”

She wipes blood from her nose, grunts assent.

“Aces. And it’s one of yours,” I lie, hoping to hit pay dirt. “A profile of Gortham. You compiled it. You broadcasted it out the channels.” I set one index finger down on the table. “And he came here.”

“Well now, don’t you all look alike?” Mac Heath rubs at her neck as she draws my greatcoat back from Sable. Lips pressed tight together, she hands it to me, and she doesn’t shudder or show any form of emotion as she stares at her shattered paramour.

I ain’t made of such stern stuff, so I take my coat, give it a good shake and glance away, far, far away. “What’s special about it?” I push on. Through. “What was special about him?”

“I’m just a butcher, aye?” Holds her hands up. Her bloody raw hands.

“You want to live?” I demand. “Want your Maori? Tell me he showed.”

Staring down at her lost paramour, staring into the abyss, Mac Heath nods slowly, once. “Sure. Your hayseed showed.” She waves a hand. “Like you said. Typical sodder. All eager to please. Like some god-damned puppy. ” I imagine her voice almost chokes up. “Slough had done him a number. Arm. Fingers. Came looking to hock a kidney. Standard op. Payout. Good coin. No muss no fuss.” She slides one finger into Sable’s liquid tresses then lifts it, lets her black hair slide like a viper back over, down, dead. “Was gonna pay off his family’s mooring tax or seed core. Make daddy proud. Something…” She rubs the back of her neck. “Anyways, I prepped him. Knocked him sideways with the ether.”

I’m practically salivating. “Something happen under the knife?”

“Never went under the knife. My knife, at least.”

I wait, let the poison seep its way out on its own.

“I got no customers on that.” She nods toward the data-board. “Got plenty of smoke, but no fire.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is I got a lot of interest from the broadcast, but it ended up being a no-show. I was hoping to start a bidding war. Skyrocket the piece. But it became a blind swipe.” I raise an eyebrow and she explains. “You cut out an organ without a receiver, try to move it before it spoils.”

“That happen often?”

“Since the slough? With demand up? Almost never, but, a bird in hand and all…” She sniffs. “I’d have moved it by dawn, noon at the latest.” She says it confidently. “There’s always someone looking. Always someone asking. Always someone somewhere.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened is I got jacked up.”

“By who?”

“By some gents you want no part of.” She shakes her head. “They took your hayseed.”

“And you didn’t have any say in the matter?”

“Oh, I had plenty to say.” She turns to me, her serpentine eyebrow lifted. “Just figured getting paid was jake and getting dead wasn’t.”

“What about your muscle?”

“Muscle?” she scoffs. “Outclassed. Big time. You see that greasy shit, Draegar, you give him one for me.”

Already done, but I don’t blab. “They paid you?”

“Not enough,” she deadpans.

“And that’s all?”

“There anything more than that?”

“Who were these rude gents I want no part of?” I ask.

“Professionals.” She nods to herself.

“How many were there?”

“Six.”

“They from the Boneyard?”

“The Boneyard,” she scoffs; she has a talent for scoffing. “Nay. Didn’t recognize any of them. But sure as shit they weren’t local. And they weren’t some two-clip Yankton knucklebusters.” She considers, nods. “One had a new-market steam-jack prosthetic. A Mitsubishi mule-kicker. A pair were wearing mech suits. Steam rigs, combat chassis, Swiss, full body. All slick shit.” She nods, gaze spacing, lost in the moment. “Real slick. Their guns were line-toppers. No Boneyarders tote those bones.”

“Who was the head?”

“Him?” She shrugs. “Strange fella. Robed. Wore a metal mask rendered to look like a face.” She pauses, considers. “He was short. Shorter than me. Seemed a little on the sly. Spoke with a lisp.”

“A mask?” I look at her through one eye. “Not mech?”

She shakes her head. “No moving parts.”

“Anything stand out about it?”

“Besides it was a fucking metal mask?” She laughs once, mirthless.

The man in the iron mask and a crew to beat the bush. Low key they are not. So someone somewhere’s heard of these blokes and I’ll find them. I flip the data-board in my hand. “Can your engine read this?”

She glances over to the difference engine in the corner, busted wide open, gears and sprockets and pneumatic switches laid wide open by a gash in its side. “It’s on the fritz.”

“Who could then?”

“Could ain’t the problem. It’s would.” She rubs her thumb and forefinger together. “You got steel?”

“Sure,” I lie.

“Then there’s a few places. Most of them black market subsidiaries of the legal med-tech giants.” She fingers her lower lip. It’s a fine example of lower lip. “There’s an outfit out of Amber Torque. Real high end. Let’s see, west of the Dead River there’s one in Larceny Gardens. The Zaibatsu have one in Chinktown. One on a coal derrick floating north of the city. And there’s even one from your neck of the woods.”

“My neck of the woods?”

“Malabar. Wog who used to front for Naydari BioTech runs a chop shop now. On the west side.”

“Chirag Khanna?” I hazard.

She points at me with a gun hand, cocks the thumb, fires away. “Give that man a cigar.”

“You broadcast to him?”

“I broadcast to everybody.”

I let that simmer for a minute while I think, then move on. “Gortham came with a friend, a Swede boy…” I plant that seed in the dirt, see what sprouts.

“The masked man paid him off.” She breathes in through her nose. “It was a fair sum.”

“And what’s a fair sum for hamstringing a friend?”

“To a corn-fed hayseed?” She shrugs. “Thirty clips or so. More than he’s ever seen before. Enough he shouldn’t have to work for a year or two. Maybe five if he’s smart.”

“Was he?”

“Genius.” She hesitates. “It was all beyond me.”

“You think that absolves you?”

“Not looking for absolution, aye?”

“They cut his throat. A fifteen-year-old kid. Gods know what they’re doing to Gortham.”

“World’s a harsh mistress,” Mac Heath says, nodding as she makes her way around her desk, reaches into a drawer. My Webley-Colt’s trained on her before she looks up. “It’ll fuck you good or it’ll fuck you bad, but it’ll fuck you hard, that’s for damn sure.” A knife’s in her well-manicured hand, a surgeon’s amputation blade, all long and shiny and antiseptic merciless.

“So you didn’t cut him? Didn’t transplant anything? You just knocked him flat and sold his carcass to these upscale bruisers? That fair accurate?”

“Except the bit about the carcass.” She tests the edge of the blade with her thumb. “He was alive last I saw.”

“That a condition you surmise is chronic?”

“You really want me to dignify that with a response?”

“Know what they wanted him for?”

“A kidney?” she hazards.

“You sure about that?”

“Nay,” she laughs again, cold as winter’s mercy, “but if they wanted more, your hayseed’s shit out of luck.” Mac Heath snatches a fistful of Sable’s black hair and drags her body sliding off the table, thumping to the floor, tangled loose in a pile of convoluted limb. She leans forward over the smooth expanse of metal, her eyes gleaming ravenous. “Now where’s my Maori?”