Same as the old boss, p.1
Same as the Old Boss, page 1
SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
MISSION 14
BLACK OCEAN: MIRTH & MAYHEM
J.S. MORIN
Copyright © 2023 J.S. Morin
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J.S. Morin — First Edition
SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
MISSION 14
For a core world that saw Earth on a clear night, nights on Mars could get awfully dark. Civilization had its limits, especially when you lived on the edge of society by choice. Zach Durocher had left his hover parked behind a warehouse in the starport district of New Montreal. A sixth sense had told him not to get inside. In daylight hours, he’d have a couple of his buddies scan it to be sure. Just, in the back of his mind, he couldn’t see powering it up and it not exploding.
Too many guys had gone of late. Gone where? Who knew? It hadn’t been a series of hovers rigged to explode, but that didn’t settle the nagging dread in Zach’s belly.
Guys were just disappearing.
No rhyme or reason.
He was old enough. He remembered the war between the Ruckers and the Diamond Brothers Syndicate. His old man had been around for the time Angelo tried to oust Theo. Those were huge, bloody battles filled with knifings, stranglings, blasters, mysterious “accidents,” and, yeah, more than a couple of hovers rigged to blow as soon as the engines powered up.
But this? This time was different.
Zach cut through an alley on foot, trying not to look like prey. Inside his jacket, he gripped the handle of his blaster, finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard. If someone had a mind to make him disappear, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
A scuff of shoes behind him sent Zach into a sprint. Heart pounding, he raced to put distance between him and whoever was back there. He’d take the ribbing if it was one of his own crew or just a random stim-head pissing behind the waste reclaim outlets. A P-tech padlock on a side door melted away at the single blaster bolt.
Zach put his shoulder to the door, bounced off, then realized it pulled outward. Yanking it open, he darted inside and slammed the door behind him.
He muffled his own ragged breath with a hand, shut his eyes, and listened for sounds of pursuit.
What a disgrace. His old man would have disowned him, seeing him like this. Cowering. Afraid of his own hover. Practically pissing himself over a footstep that maybe he’d heard, maybe he’d imagined.
That paranoia seemed far less unjustified when a man stepped through the wall beside him. Not through any door, window, or gap in old masonry, but right through a solid damned wall.
Zach had his blaster out in an instant, but the guy’s casual demeanor kept him from squeezing the trigger before checking. “Who the fuck are you?”
The wall-passer dressed in a shabby hooded sweatshirt and looked like he shaved with hedge trimmers. Tall and lanky, he slouched as he sauntered in front of Zach’s blaster without a care in the galaxy. Only the keen look in the guy’s eyes, plain even in the shit lighting from warehouse fluorescents, told him that this was anything more than a vagabond with a flair for showmanship.
“Consider this a loyalty test,” the mystery man told him.
What kind of loyalty test came from an utter stranger? Zach had never set eyes on this guy in his life. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a disguise. After all, walking through a wall had to be a lot trickier than altering a face. “I’m behind Theo a hundred fifty percent. If that’s what’s happening here, I’m a fucking rock. Same as my old man.”
The newcomer nodded. “Good. That’s what I needed to hear.”
Zach relaxed, lowering his blaster but not putting it away. “Christ. You scared the shit out of me. What’s going on, anyway?”
“Step away from the wall, if you don’t mind?” the stranger ordered mildly, beckoning with his fingers.
Zach complied, unsure why the guy needed him to move. But, again, he was clearly dealing with a wizard, so he played along with whatever goofy shit was happening here.
“Much better. Thanks. As for what’s going on. You just happen to be hitched tight to the wrong horse.”
Before Zach could lift his weapon to defend himself, he looked the wizard in the eye.
After a long night’s work, sometimes a cold beer was all the reward a man needed. Chuck Ramsey, however, would have preferred getting a chance to sleep with his wife.
Back in New Singapore, Becky was living the high life—literally instead of figuratively—in a tower apartment paid for by Rucker money funneled through Brad. That much they let him know. She was safe. Michelle and Rhiannon were thriving in school. All Chuck had to do to keep things that way was to help Don Rucker win this war of his, ideally before the first shot was fired in return.
This was their third consecutive night in the Station Street safehouse. Bernadette had been planetside for weeks now since Bart’s top people had been added to the plot. She’d been erasing their digital footprints behind them while Pink-Eye and Willie the Nail handled their physical security. Any sign of suspicious activity, and they moved to the next safehouse in the rotation. Other teams kept their network of hideouts secure.
Chuck was as much a prisoner as he was a mastermind. Don had designated him as chief judge, an impartial outside arbiter of loyalty and integrity unbounded by the preconceptions, personal debts, and longstanding familiarity that might cloud the biases of his own people.
His entire career as a con man had been about sifting sharks from suckers and siphoning money from the latter. Now, he’d been asked to use those same skills to sort the sharks into categories. To cull, or not to cull; that was the question.
Their meals were mostly takeaway fare. Tonight, on the overnight shift, Willie the Nail was showing off his culinary chops, searing filets on a skillet in the safehouse kitchen.
The door slid open without warning.
Around the room, blasters leapt from holsters.
Mort patted the air with a hand to let everyone know it was just him. “You people ought to know by now that anyone worth shooting, your lookouts would spot.”
“Good hunting?” Pink-Eye inquired. He looked up from his array of screens that monitored the approaches to the safehouse, screens that had done nothing to alert him of the wizard’s impending arrival.
“Don’t expect to see Zachary Durocher again.” At a crook of Mort’s finger, the spare fridge popped open and launched a beer can at him.
“Good enough for him,” Willie the Nail called out from the kitchen over the sizzle of steak.
A chill ran up Chuck’s spine. People just vanishing. Names he’d picked out of piles of flatpics, police reports, anecdotes. Condemned men he’d never met. Guys who’d just set off Chuck’s little self-preservative instincts that told him, based on any number of factors he could glean, that they wouldn’t help pull when Don threw a noose around Theo’s neck.
The wizard dragged up a chair beside Chuck’s little makeshift workstation in the safehouse living room. “How goes the search for the next disappearing act?”
Setting aside flat sheets of insta-burn plastic dossiers, Chuck slouched back. “Painstaking. We can’t afford to lose good people. And the best ones are the hardest to tell.”
Mort patted him on the shoulder and offered the beer he’d summoned. “You look like you can use this more than me.”
“But you’ve been out all night doing actual—”
Another beer slapped into Mort’s waiting palm.
“Fine. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. And as far as your search goes, I squeezed a name out of Zachary before he went away.”
Bernadette perked up, acknowledging Mort’s arrival for the first time. None of his little antics had showed the least harm to the tech, which seemed to be all she cared about. “Oh? Who?”
“Corey Shaw.”
Pink-Eye scoffed. “C-man? He’s as solid as they come.”
“Too solid,” Mort agreed. “Zach was convinced he’d turn on his own crew before betraying Theo.”
Bernadette shook her head, not in disbelief but discouragement. “Not a good sign. Earl’s house is a fucking mess. Don’s people will fall into line like dominoes, but Earl’s…”
“Hey, that’s why we’re here, right?” Chuck asked of the room at large. He didn’t want internal strife on top of all the external sort they had right now.
“Double-check him,” Bernadette ordered. “He’s a good soldier. Be a shame to clip him on a lone informant’s hunch. Even if Zach was convinced, that doesn’t mean he wa s right.”
Chuck sighed. “On it.” He cracked open a beer and set to work going back over a file he’d discarded as ‘reliably backing Don’ weeks ago.
He wondered…
If this went on long enough, would all the Ruckers just be dead? Would Chuck just one day walk out of a safehouse free and clear because there wasn’t a damn soul left on either side of this conflict? It felt like this bush was getting trimmed right to the trunk.
Maybe he and Mort could get away scot free if they just… added a few names here and there.
He cast a quick glance at the wizard.
Was Mort doing it already?
The garage wasn’t Brad’s favorite part of this job. In the current environment in the syndicate, it was a necessary evil. Two hovers lay in pieces, guts splayed out neatly over the floor and nearby work benches. Nico had three different scanners he was using to check for sabotage. Kenny and Baggy Ben worked on further disassembling the vehicles, while Double Pete watched for interlopers.
“Brad, if you’re not gonna help, mind grabbing some coffees?” Kenny asked from the floor atop a repulsor board.
These were Brad’s guys. They ran jobs past him before running things on their own, and they kicked up anything they pulled in. When Brad had something big enough, they were the ones he pulled back first to run with. The minute he started fetching coffee for them, the chain of command would break down.
“Right now, Kenny, I’m more worried about someone coming through the skylight and disintegrating us than I am with you needing a cup of coffee. This isn’t a union shop. Take a fucking coffee break if you need one.”
Casually dropping in the mention of disintegrations played into a common myth running around the syndicate. Someone, the theory went, had gotten ahold of some military ordinance, and they were using it to make rivals disappear.
The problem, as Brad saw things, was that the Ruckers didn’t have serious competition on Mars these days. Sure, little sibling syndicates popped up here and there, maybe running a neighborhood or a small city. They got to exist until they got in the Ruckers’ way. After that, it was either get absorbed or get dusted.
In this case, the Ruckers thought someone had turned the tables and was dusting their guys—literally.
Pointedly making a pot of coffee, then pouring one for only himself, Brad allowed the anointed mechanics to continue their work.
Frankly, he didn’t know whom to trust out there in the syndicate right now. Tempers were raw. Nerves were ragged.
“Freeze right there! Right there!” Double Pete shouted, drawing his blaster and aiming it out the open garage door and into the darkness beyond.
Brad had his blaster out without even spilling his coffee. The strip-down crew scrambled for their weapons.
“Don’t shoot!” a teenage voice squeaked in terror.
Nico stuffed his blaster in the front of his coveralls. “Fuck’s sake, Pete. That’s dinner.”
A takeaway delivery pilot approached bearing three heavy white plastic bags with the Noodle-O-Rama logo on them, plus a six-pack of beer. Brad recognized the delivery company uniform. There, but for the grace of God, flew him. A few months back, he was the one ferrying meals to gangsters.
Holstering his own weapon, Brad made sure this kid didn’t leave with the wrong idea. He pressed a hardcoin thousand into the kid’s palm once Double Pete accepted their dinner. “No hard feelings.”
The kid nearly shook his head off, nodding agreement with the sentiment, then ran back to his hoverbike.
“That weren’t even a hundred terras worth of food he brung,” Kenny complained. “You don’t gotta go setting expectations like that.”
“Funny,” Brad commented wryly. “Jimmy tips like that.”
“No. Fuckin’. Way,” Kenny shot back.
Nico snickered. “He’s bleedin’ it back out of you if he did.”
“Flow will pick back up,” Brad assured them. As if any one of them believed he knew a damn thing about syndicate financial fluctuations. Jimmy might have been taking business classes here and there, but Brad had a spotty public school education that didn’t include a high school diploma.
“Maybe. When we’re out earning instead of stripping the whole garage twice a week.”
Kenny was exaggerating, but Brad shared the underlying frustration. “Look. Whatever’s going on, you guys are my responsibility. Any chaos has winners and losers, and dead guys don’t get to play. I’m setting us up to come out as winners.”
“Winners with the cleanest fucking fuel clamps on Mars!” Nico cheered sarcastically.
While technically they were looking for explosives, compromised aerial attitude controllers, rigged repulsors, and the like, one side effect was a maintenance routine that a starfighter hangar crew could be proud of.
For whatever reason, core world Noodle-O-Rama never tasted as good as out in the colonies. If he had to venture a guess, it was that the food remained the same while the alternatives got better the closer you got to Earth. As the leader of this crew, he had the prerogative to change the dinner menu any time he liked. Instead, he’d opted for a round-robin system where everyone got to pick. Double Pete had the palate of a seven-year-old. Michelle would eat anything, but even she’d grown out of liking Noodle-O-Rama.
Nico and Kenny got one of the hovers reassembled by daybreak and used it to drop everyone off where they were crashing.
Brad’s humble little apartment was an intentional downgrade from his luxury hotel room. Everything since he’d gotten to Mars had been a little too big, a little too shiny, a little too expensive. Not that he couldn’t afford better. He just didn’t like better.
Sixty square meters still felt huge to a guy who’d grown up aboard the Radio City. However, while Nissa had slummed a bit staying over at the ship, despite his family, she wasn’t keen on his backsliding. She’d been staying over infrequently. With her own graduation now a week in the past, the renewed pressure on him was only going to build.
Before turning in for the night, Brad popped a pill to hedge against another assault on his freedom. While someone planting a bomb in the personal hover of the lowest of low-rent lieutenants in the Rucker hierarchy seemed unlikely, Nissa turning off her hormone regulator was the real danger in Brad’s life.
Four seven-year-olds tore through the Ramsey apartment, shrieking in a mixture of excitement, delight, terror, and demonic possession. Becky would be damned if she could tell one from the next. All varying degrees of trained singers, these little girls had pipes. The nature of their games also eluded her. Near as she could figure, it had something to do with a matching set of dolls they all had one of each, and maybe some kind of tag or keep-away.
From the couch, Becky tried not to interfere. Socialization, the omni called it. Being around kids their own ages was good for them. However, those same omni articles hadn’t warned her about the dangers of it being her turn to host the playdates. Everything had seemed hunky dory when it was just dropping off Rhiannon at some friend’s house for the afternoon. Today was giving her second thoughts about the value of social interactions for kids.
At least Michelle wasn’t a problem on that front. Her feet didn’t even dangle anymore when she sat in the kitchen chairs. Becky had forbidden cloistering herself in the bedroom to play games on her datapad. If she wanted to get lost in her own antisocial kiddie junk apps, she could do it out where Becky could see her.
Rhiannon and friends tore past with one of the girls in pursuit. Becky barely had time to snatch her drink off the table. It was just virgin piña colada, but that didn’t mean Becky wanted it—or a shattered glass—all over the rug. Just thinking about the bottles in the wine fridge under the kitchen island made Becky question her choice of beverage for the afternoon.
Being sober sounded great until it came time to supervise a “running of the bulls” in her own living room.
Michelle didn’t seem bothered by the commotion. What a great kid. Least trouble of the lot by kilometers. Hardly ever caused mischief or asked for anything. She went to a regular school, cooked her own meals, didn’t have to be reminded about bedtimes.
