Reciprocity

  Sean Locke

  Reciprocity

  First published by Galaxy Brain Press in 2018

  Copyright © Sean Locke, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  To Meredith and the kids.

  Thank you for making me a better person.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  THE OBLIGATORY MAILING LIST CALL TO ACTION

  THE ALGORITHM HUNGERS, AND IT MUST FEED

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  Most people complained about their jobs, and most days I’d sympathize. But that morning I would have given a fortune to trade places with any steelworker or meat packer. I sat crammed into the back of a car at seven thirty in the morning, kissing kneecaps with three hungover or still-drunk Lange gangsters, and every sharp turn and missing chunk of asphalt in the road threatened me with a lap full of sour vomit. Our car and two others like it were hell-bent on some errand Pino didn’t want to talk about. But when the little man came rushing into the lobby of the Exedra Arms crying for all hands on deck, you damn well moved. It was important enough to rouse a dozen of my colleagues out of their usual drunken stupor, and to interrupt my morning communion with steak and eggs.

  He’d also ordered up tarps, buckets, bleach, and other things that spelled No Good for a Restday morning.

  One of the guys in the backward-facing seat interrupted my speculation with an alarming moan and shudder. His sallow face was pale and slick with sweat. Narrow shoulders drew inward, and bony nicotine-stained fingers laced over his knees.

  “Milan, you had better hold your stomach,” I said. “This courier getup is clean, and I swear to the gods.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said weakly. “You’ll kill me and feed me to the sewer caimans.”

  “Maybe not in that order,” I said, smiling so I wouldn’t look too serious.

  He tilted his head to the man on his left. “Listen to this girl, will you?”

  “Couldn’t she just shoot us instead?” the bigger man, Bart, murmured. He poked a sausage-fat finger into the middle of his forehead. “So much faster.”

  “Nah, man, too loud. Anyway, guns are illegal, and gods know we don’t want to be caught breaking the law.”

  Bart chuckled, and then groaned like he regretted it. “You’re a laugh a minute. Maybe if the cops came and strung me up, I wouldn’t fight ‘em too hard. I’m never drinking with you again.”

  “Not till next time, anyway.” Milan mopped his brow with a dingy handkerchief and looked at me. “Why are you dressed like a message girl, anyway? Not that I’m complaining.”

  I pulled my leather gloves tighter onto my forearms and adjusted my protective shoulder pads. The black leather vest and trousers were indecently tight, and the reinforcing steel rods sewn into the material just happened to draw attention to a girl’s lines and curves. Once upon a time, I wore this uniform while pretending to work at Quicksilver Messenger Services. Hendrik Lange — fearless leader of the Lange family—didn’t look too kindly on snitches in his operations, and he sent me there to hunt rats.

  That bit of business was over last year, thank the gods, but the uniform still fit just fine.

  “Pino says that Kasper wanted me in this getup.”

  Milan leered. “If I was the Boss’s boy, I’d ask you to dress up for me, too. Gods’ truth, you look good in those —”

  “Save it,” I suggested, and looked out the window. The Spray glittered in the sky as dawn lit up the eastern rise of the planetary ring. The moon Kaiaa was full, peeking above the veil of the Spray, her looks washed out just a little by the sun. Smaller Arodd was sleeping on the other side of the planet, but I knew he’d come around by late afternoon. It was the prettiest time of day, just before Leemte’s factories and smokestacks started belching their filth. “No disrespect, but you don’t have a chance, even in your current charming state.”

  “Kaeri Hawen, honestly,” Milan said, crumpling his shirt just over his heart, his face forlorn. “That hurts.”

  Bart nudged him with a meaty elbow. The huge man lacked a neck and had hands as subtle as bowling balls. “How drunk are you? No man has a chance with her. Not even me; can you imagine?”

  A pothole bounced us in our seats, knocking the two men’s heads together. They groaned and cursed, scrambling to keep their fedoras on.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I can’t imagine why you fine specimens don’t catch my fancy. I should have my head examined.”

  Bart pointed a thick finger at me and said, “You know, you’re the only affiliat I let talk to me like that? Maybe someone else wouldn’t be so understanding of your, uh, peculiar circumstances.”

  “No disrespect, of course.” I looked down at my hands and made a show of chewing my lower lip.

  “Oh, lay off her. It’s too early for the tough guy routine.” Milan sighed and settled back into his seat. “Maybe she hasn’t met the right guy, but something tells me Sleepy Jeanne has a better chance than we do.”

  Bart tilted his chin up and regarded the soldat seated next to me. Jeanne was out cold as usual, her head bouncing rhythmically against the window, her knee pressed to mine. I hid a grimace. Truth was, Jeanne and I did have a tumble last year, after both of us had had too much to drink. She wasn’t the brightest stone in the Spray, but she knew enough to keep her mouth shut about it. Neither of us needed those idiot men leering at us from under their hats.

  The heap slowed to a halt outside a dockside warehouse, saving me from any other delicate questions. I got out of the car before it stopped completely, grateful for the cool, salty air tinged with fish and coal smoke. The other cars stopped behind ours, and the rest of the crew piled out as fast as their hungover bodies let them.

  Little rat-faced Pino paced while the mooks got their act together. Pino was a ladoni, one of the species of little people who did the dirty, dangerous jobs no one else wanted. Ladoni were small-statured, but nobody sane or sober would mistake one for a human child, not with the thousand-meter stare a lot of them got. They were small enough to worm their bodies into tight, hot spaces in factory equipment, airships, submarines, sewers — all sorts of nasty places — to keep things running. Lucky ones like Pino managed to buy out their hereditary contracts. Sometimes they got a patron to buy them out, and then they’d do a different kind of dirty work. Kasper bought Pino’s contract five years back, and Pino has been running his errands ever since.

  “Come on, you lugs,” he said, his voice gravelly like a three-cigar habit. The soldaten milled sullenly, hands shoved in pockets, hat brims pulled ov
er bloodshot eyes. “Kasper’s waiting on you, and there’s a job to get done.”

  “Bart,” Milan said, annoyed, “last time I checked, every damn body here, apart from Kaeri, are soldaten. Made men and women. We don’t usually get treated like this, do we?”

  “I believe you’re right. Maybe the shortling ought to learn some manners, ‘fore someone accidentally steps on him.”

  “You don’t like it, tell it to Meneer Verboom. Or hell, take it up with Kasper, or the Boss,” Pino said, a crooked sneer on his face. “They’re all in there waiting.”

  The soldaten straightened their spines and their coats at the mention of the three most powerful men in the Lange organization, all attending whatever shit show was inside the warehouse.

  I led the way in, and nobody seemed to mind me being first. The soldaten filed in silently behind me.

  * * *

  Inside, sunlight slashed through second-story windows, leaving bright bars in the dusty gloom. The usual smells of wood dust, tar, and the Great Socket Bay hung in the air, but the subtle notes of wet iron and human shit told me something bad had gone down not too long before. Pino looked over his shoulder at us before turning the corner around some crates, maybe to make sure we were still following. He pressed a handkerchief to his face. I hurried ahead of the others, wanting to get an eyeful of whatever it was and be done with it without worrying about someone sicking up on my feet.

  A tangle of bodies lay strewn in a rough line, some crumpled like dolls tossed to the ground, some slumped against the wall as though sleeping off a bender. Fat black flies gathered in the wide pools of commingled blood, on soaked suits and hats and silken evening dresses, on slack faces and pale hands. My eyes flicked to the wall behind them, smeared red-brown and pocked with dozens of holes. Sunlight filtered through and made miniature spotlights on things I didn’t want to see. I sucked in a breath and let my eyes go out of focus.

  This was bad. Last time I’d seen something this bad was ten years ago, before I’d even started running with Lange. Whatever Kasper wanted with me, it was bound to be something I wouldn’t have chosen to do. I didn’t mind saying I was damned tired of it all – of Lange and Rademaker at each other’s throats, of breaking kneecaps on someone else’s say-so, of these men telling me what to do.

  Feet shuffled behind me. Someone said, “Mother and Father God.” Someone else retched. I turned my back on the bodies and walked away, not much wanting to see them anymore and not much wanting to listen to the soldaten complain. What I saw when I turned away didn’t help my digestion.

  The Boss, Hendrik Lange, stood with his raadsman Ludo Verboom. Nobody called them by their given names out loud, of course — it was always the Boss and Meneer Verboom. It was probably smart to forget their mothers had even gave them first names, but no one ever accused me of being smart. Hendrik stood with his arms folded atop his expansive belly, his scowl clamped around a cold cigar, his thinning black hair pomaded into submission. Ludo’s craggy, angular face and closely cropped gray pate allowed him the broad range of expression from grimace to glare, and that was about it. Both men were listening to Pino give his report of who was present, and who couldn’t be roused quickly enough. Nobody wanted to be in that second group.

  The Boss’s son Kasper and his new friend Henriette Cantabile sat on a stack of pallets a little ways off, leaning their heads together. Kasper was the heir apparent to the Lange empire, and he liked to take advantage of the perks that came with the job. He was a big, ruddy-faced lad of twenty-six who liked his food and booze. We were the same age, Kasper and me, and we both breathed oxygen; that was about where the similarities ended. That he was awake at all at eight in the morning on a Restday was bad news, because he’d either woken up early, or he hadn’t passed out yet.

  I’d gotten used to him and Henriette getting up sometime after ten-thirty, nursing their hangovers with fresh appelkoekjes, bacon, and the hair of the dog. Henriette was a posh, blonde-haired beauty, razor sharp and too young by half. But like any girl of noble birth, she knew her way around a gun and a sword, so I supposed she could handle herself. Swell kids like Henriette sometimes came down from the Middle Terrace to slum it with the common folks, but they usually roamed in packs for their own safety. Henriette Cantabile was either very good or very stupid to be palling around with Kasper on her own.

  Ludo left Hendrik’s side, his flinty eyes locked on my face. The old man had been the Lange raadsman for as long as anyone could remember. Hushed rumor had it that when Hendrik’s mother Donatella was running the show, Ludo performed certain duties that exceeded a raadsman’s mandate, but no one with any sense of self-preservation repeated things like that. People said that history made him ruthless and needlessly cruel, but he never got too nasty with me. Today, he looked grim as granite, but his face softened a little as he approached.

  “Bad bit of business, Kaeri,” he rumbled.

  “Nasty,” I agreed, crossing my arms and looking at his brown loafers. In the dim morning light, I could see faint red spatters on his heels. “Eight or nine, lined up and shot dead, yeah? Maybe more. Whose?”

  “Rademaker, and people with ‘em. Twelve, all up. You didn’t recognize Ballsy Borst and his moll?”

  I shook my head. “Didn’t look too close.”

  “I understand.” Ludo shoved his hands in his pockets and blew out a breath.

  “I did see footprints in the blood,” I said, too quickly, scuffing my boot in the dust. “Someone get away?”

  “Not a one. Those footprints are mine. They had a couple little derringers and blackjacks, and I took their wallets and valuables.”

  I nodded. “Any of them manage to shoot back?”

  “No,” he replied, his lip curling in disgust. “It wasn’t what you’d call a fair fight.”

  “Meneer Verboom,” I asked, “we do this?”

  Ludo cleared his throat. He worked his lips around his front teeth, the way he did when he was thinking of the right thing to say. “Well, never mind. I should get these people organized. Kasper wants to see you.”

  He patted my shoulder and strode off, his voice suddenly large and his posture commanding. He told Sleepy Jeanne to get a small fishing boat, sent someone else to get the tarps from the cars, and the rest to roll up their sleeves.

  Milan and Bart looked at me in envy and puzzlement. They were soldaten — men of some prestige. Officially I was an affiliat, an errand girl. Now I was apparently someone Meneer Verboom talked to privately, someone asked for by Kasper himself.

  I shrugged an apology and moved on. The day had enough trouble without my having to wonder what the soldaten thought of me.

  The two lovebirds murmured to each other, a violin case lying across both their laps. Kasper looked uncharacteristically pale, his eyes red with lack of sleep. His suit was creased with wrinkles, and spots of blood dotted his cuffs. His hat was missing altogether. He stroked the case absently, and I couldn’t fathom why he had it. He sipped on the silver flask in his other hand, well on his way to drunk, or wanting to stay there.

  Henriette giggled at whatever Kasper just said, and leaned her head on his shoulder. She looked pretty as usual, in a low-cut red dress that was not suitable at all for a morning out. A blond ringlet had come loose, curling by her slender neck.

  I stood straight and silent, waiting for them to notice me. Nearby, the soldaten were cutting away blood-soaked clothes and rolling corpses into tarps like grotesque cannolis. Soon they would haul the wrapped corpses onto some boat Jeanne was procuring, burn the clothes in the ship’s furnace, and sink the tarp-wrapped bodies with cinder blocks. Leave one or two guys here to dump a bucket of vampire beetles on the floor and sweep them up again when they were fat and sleepy, then scrub everything down with bleach and hot water. Maybe patch the holes in the wall if there was time. I didn’t envy them.

  “Kaeri Hawen, you’re here and dressed for the job,” Kasper said, his nasal voice grating in my ear. He glanced around, and I guessed he was looking for
his father. Who else would he need to be wary of? He pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket. It jingled like it held coins. “I got something for you to do.”

  I kept my face neutral and looked at his tie, pulled off-center and daubed with blood. The jeweled pin hanging loose from the tie could probably feed a family of four for a week. “Anything you need, Meneer Lange.”

  He pressed the case into my hand. Whiskey and gunpowder briefly overwhelmed the slaughterhouse smell of the place. “To Cornelius Lewis, his hands only. You know where his workshop is?”

  “Yes, meneer.” I stuffed the case into my courier’s pouch and buckled it to my belt. “Lower Terrace, corner of Anvil and Wheelwright.”

  He waved a hand impatiently. “Yeah, sure, sure. His hands only, and quick, all right? Wait for him to write a reply to me. You don’t need to see it.”

  “Of course. I’m happy to do it.”

  I wasn’t happy at all. Something about this stunk real bad, stunk worse than a dozen shot-up corpses piled in a warehouse. I wanted to find out what it was.

  Kasper eyeballed me for a moment, then thrust a warning finger in my face. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  I dipped a knee and bowed my head before leaving him.

  As I left, I saw Ludo and Hendrik staring. I sketched them a respectful nod and salute before hurrying out of the warehouse.

  Chapter 2

  Leemte was a teardrop-shaped island, some hundred twenty kilometers long north to south, and fifty wide at its fattest point. It sat in the middle of the Diemer Delta, at the northern end of the Great Socket Bay. The island was home to a million souls, so I heard, most of them struggling to scrape a guilder out of the dirt, and some of them rich beyond the wildest imagining. A million, but probably more—the newspapers only ever counted the humans.

  My brother once told me that Leemte looked like a layer cake from the air. Long before humans settled here, the native ancient o’atha had somehow carved the island into three distinct terraces of land and called it a holy place. Humans sailed up out of the southern hemisphere a couple hundred years back, during the last Great Abatement, and kicked all the o’atha out. Now elaborate gates and walls separated the Lower Terrace from the Middle and Upper. I’d seen those gates slam shut during food riots and hurricanes. I’d seen the garrison with their rifles and grapeshot keep the filthy masses away from the nobility.