Free Wear Iron by Al Ewing Page A

contest. Use your noodle, Mooney.”
    “Oh, okay.” Mooney slumped in his chair, visibly sulking—the suicide-bomber aspect seemed to be rubbing him the wrong way, but he’d been up for three days straight and didn’t have an alternative. He unscrewed his hip-flask and took a swallow, grimacing a little at the cleaning-fluid taste of the booze. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bottle on the table. “Where the hell did you get that stuff, anyway?”
    A couple of hours before he’d kept his appointment at the Edmonds Institute, Rico had stopped in with another of his ever-growing list of contacts. Vassily Grochenko, late of Moscow-St-Petersburg—or East-Meg, as they’d called it since the war ended—was an old man with a reedy voice and a permanently sour expression, who’d kept a connection open to the thriving arms trade in what was left of the Euro-cities. He was the man to see about explosives.
    “Is so difficult for me here, Rico,” the old man had sighed, nursing the same cup of cold tea that he always seemed to have in his hand whenever Rico dropped into the frozen hole he kept over in Dan Duryea. “I am missing home. The children, when they are buying the guns from me, they are so rude.” He’d shaken his head, taking a sip of the tea. “You want your money, yes? Is always money with you. You are Judge—what you spend the money on, eh?”
    “Oh, this and that. I always need money.” Rico had smiled. “But I don’t necessarily need yours. If you play ball, you won’t need to worry about paying me off ever again.” The old man’s eyes had lit up, and Rico’d known then that he’d be walking out of there with everything he needed.
    Vassily had come through, all right, and Rico had been true to his word. Vassily had no worries now. It was a shame to cut off such a neat source of revenue so messily, but Vassily could be a little too chatty for his own good sometimes—besides, old men fell and broke their necks all the time. It probably would have happened anyway. At least that was Rico’s way of thinking.
    “None of your beeswax,” he smiled at Mooney, leaning back on the kitchen chair. “Come on, Buddy-boy, I’m due on the streets in ten minutes—I really don’t want to go back out there with your blood on my knuckles. You know how we’re pulling off the riots, and you know when. Let me hear what you’ve got.”
    “Okay,” Mooney rubbed a knuckle in his eye socket, scowling. “I managed to scare up the plans for the Herc, no thanks to you. Had to pay a few people a few bribes—creds I don’t exactly have, y’know? If this job don’t work out the way we think it will, I’ll be out on the street.”
    Rico nodded sympathetically. There was no danger of Mooney being left on the street, though—the only place he was going was the Resyk belt. But he didn’t need to know that.
    “Now, creds are paid in the ticket booths here—they’ll all be automatic. Exact change only. So the cash is all gonna get funnelled through to this room over here”—he tapped another part of the map, a storage room close to the ticket machines—“and once it’s in there, it goes right into money sacks for collection. So there’ll be a couple of schmoes in there working. Plus guards—maybe four or five? Nothing special, mind—just your average rentacops. Not good enough for the Academy, y’know?”
    Rico nodded. “Oh, I know.”
    Mooney narrowed his eyes, giving him a hard stare. “Are there gonna be any Judges back there, you think? Could mess up the plan if one of the guys has to take on any real opposition.”
    Rico considered the question for a moment. “If there are—Muttox is pretty dumb, but I wouldn’t put it past him to think of it—they’ll be needed, either when the panic hits in the stands or when the bodies start piling up outside. They won’t be backstage long.” He sat back, rubbing his ample chin, and for a moment the frown on his face made him seem like a