For all her many private, imagined rehearsals, Heavy Snow is not prepared when she receives the voice connection. She is lying in a hotel pod, eyes closed, trying to meditate herself to sleep in the familiar musty smell of crumbling composite wall panelling.
She had never imagined the hoarseness in the Ink-Coloured Mouse's voice.
"I think I need to attend the doctor now," she says, and for long moments all Heavy Snow can do is clench in panic.
Fortunately, she has been prepared for days. There are conveyance-servos standing by, each on an absurd daily retainer to take no passengers, only to wait in case she requires them for this; near the office, near the ship's berth, near the Spider in the White Steel Palace's boarding-house, and also near here.
She chirps the immediately relevant two, and then, Transport will arrive shortly, to Ink-Coloured Mouse. I cannot talk now.
The Ink-Coloured Mouse draws a breath, as if there's something she wants to say. She does not. Finally, instead, she says, "I see," and closes the connection.
Something low in Heavy Snow's chest pains her. She fumbles tiredly back into tunic, slacks, and double-breasted blazer; slips back into her shoes in the corridor outside the pod, and hurries outside to the conveyance-servo, chirping it the relevant tokens to identify herself as its pre-booked journey. She says nothing, needs say nothing; a matter of simple efficiency when she made these arrangements, but now — she doubts she could explain so much as her destination, throat locked tight.
Climbing stiffly out at the metro entrance below the Spider's boarding-house, she descends, ducks into the service corridors, then ascends to the room where she can don her face and voice and full capabilities. Masked and wearing her long coat, she strides out through the public exit of the boarding-house, chirping ahead for her second conveyance — to the medical facility — to be waiting and ready to leave when she reaches the street.
She arrives not long after the Ink-Coloured Mouse, quietly letting herself into a room where a doctor — a woman, hair rippled with silver at the temples, seemingly nonplussed — is attempting to persuade her patient into a medical gown.
Heavy Snow is unprepared for the sheer fear in every line of the Ink-Coloured Mouse's body. The complicity of a medical staff rings in her ears.
"Ink-Coloured Mouse," she says, and although the woman flinches, she still turns immediately to Heavy Snow, as if she is at least some known constant.
Heavy Snow swallows once, twice, and simply holds out her hand.
Ink-Coloured Mouse stares at it for a while, then reaches out and takes it. She doesn't take her eyes off the place their fingers meet, but slowly seems to shrug on a semblance of her usual impassivity.
"The gown?" Heavy Snow asks, after a while longer, and fingers close tighter on hers, but Ink-Coloured Mouse gives a terse nod.
"Are you a co-parent?" the doctor asks Heavy Snow, clearly unhappy at her unheralded appearance.
"You are being paid for your circumspection with regard to questions," Heavy Snow says, acutely aware that — with the panicky pregnant woman visibly calmed by clutching her, and refusing to let go for any second unnecessary for the removal of her clothes — under the circumstances, it sounds very like yes.
It is, she promises herself, a harmless misunderstanding, not worth clarifying. At best, even, a harmless misdirection.
Ten hours of exhaustion, shuffling back-and-forth walks of the clinic corridors, and the hot, immovable clutch of the Ink-Coloured Mouse's hand — and one brief, abrupt bout of crying into Heavy Snow's shoulder, almost as terrifying to her as the hospital seems to the Mouse — and Heavy Snow is coiled by the bedside while the other woman pants and wails and curses in a high, cold, vicious way. And pushes.
Heavy Snow has seen plenty of people in pain. Nothing, she thinks, has ever felt so bad as this, this endless thing that she can't do anything about. That she wishes she could do something about, take it away, bear it instead, anything.
And then there is a baby, which sceams as if it's voicing its mother's opinion of hospital. Feeds. Sleeps, firmly swaddled.
"People always say that their fingers are so tiny," Heavy Snow says, dazed. "I am so foolish. How are they so tiny. Is it allowed."
"Ah, your child is perfectly fine," a nurse interrupts, with a practised smile for fools at risk of being throttled, if their partners had the energy left, and Heavy Snow has not even sorted through whether to say anything when the door opens, and a man stands on the threshold to shoot the nurse twice in the back, centre mass.
"Change of plan from the Ink-Coloured Mouse's employer," he says, smiling toothily.
Heavy Snow looks down at the nurse on the floor, and catches herself, mouth open, about to blankly say but there is no employer— before, in a rush, she realises: he believes there is one, ultimately one of the port's crime lords. Tricking Ion Twelve Horizon into a vulnerable position and using it against her is a plausible thing for a crime lord to do. And the Spider in the White Steel Palace is an outside data broker, why would they be privy to the higher machinations, if they were simply part of the bait?
If there were an employer, it would be plausible. And it would be plausible for Heavy Snow to believe it.
If Heavy Snow says there isn't one, she will be next on the floor, and then there will be nobody to fix this.
"My instructions haven't been changed," she says, hearing the mask seamlessly fix up the wrongness of her tone. "Eyes on the Ink-Coloured Mouse, until she leaves the clinic."
Ion Twelve Horizon wrenches away the hand still nestled in Heavy Snow's.
"Of course," the man bluffs. "The smart money's in ransoming babies, eh? High Apparat are expensively fond of their little bundles of joy."
"Ah," Heavy Snow says, while the infantry mask's displays flicker in front of her face as its full capabilities boot: advanced onboard sensors and system warfare. "I see." She gnaws her lip while it evaluates the number of weapons in the room, and begins chewing through security on the man's equipment and insystem; the hospital's falls to it almost instantly. She flexes the hand bruised from hours of heedless grip on it, and gestures carelessly at the water dispenser in the corner of the room. "Well, since I'm no longer solo on site, I'm going to get a drink," she says.
The Ink-Coloured Mouse came with what few belongings she has for a clinic stay in a shipboard duffel, which rests on a visitor's chair against the wall, facing the foot of the bed. Heavy Snow stands, walks through the man's arc of fire as if oblivious to it, and around the foot of the bed. With what she hopes is the total, oblivious confidence of someone going about their routine job, she dips a hand into the bag as she goes by, guided by the glaring wireframes in her mask: UNSECURED FIREARM.
With her free hand, she plucks a diposable cup and puts it on the ledge beneath the dispenser's outlet. At the juncture when the mechanical sound of a valve might be expected, she follows the motions of an AR weapons training overlay to deactivate the safety mechanism of Ion Twelve Horizon's splintergun. Turning, she moves into her best imitation of the training program's firing stance.
The man has moved to the foot of the bed, leaning over it slightly to leer at the terrified woman in it, clutching her blanket-wrapped baby to her chest; side-on to Heavy Snow.
Heavy Snow has never fired a gun before. She shoots him in the head.
