Unfinished Business

Chapter Fifteen

The alley that snaked behind the buildings facing the waterfront was relatively empty, for this time of day, he noted as his bodyguards carefully checked it out. A few shoppers looking for bargains, a gaggle of Turkish women in colorful burkahs shopping for spices, a few emaciated beggars, but no sign of real problem. He nodded to his guard to continue.

Ordinarily he’d take a hovercab to a business meeting like this, but with the rendezvous only a few blocks away from his office, he felt reasonably secure walking the distance – as long as he had plenty of firepower along.

Things had been tense along the docks, recently, with bodies showing up unexpectedly and fires breaking out. Things were getting shaky all over the place, actually, ever since that gorram announcement that the Alliance had slaughtered thirty million people and created the dreaded Reavers in an effort to effectively control the huddling masses. That meant a lot of twisted knickers out there. A man in his line of work had to know which knickers were twisted.

Things had been sliding downhill since then. Local governments everywhere were in turmoil, and that included Persephone’s august Planetary Parliament. There had been a whole flurry of duels and even an assassination or two. And as shake-ups and resignations, personal feuds and jockeying for power went on, the implicit chaos had started to drift down to the lower sections of Eavesdown. You never knew if the copper you bribed last week would be open to the same agreement this week. You never knew if your contact was providing good, solid data or was setting you up for assassination. You never knew if your rivals or old enemies would try to use the situation as cover to gain control. It paid to be cautious.

He heard a noise behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder out of reflex. Merely an old Chinese man slamming down a rice pot lid too hard, he noted with relief, nothing to be worried about. The guards behind him hadn’t eve