Grailstone Gambit. James Axler
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a murmur of many voices rising around him like the sound of rushing water. Opening his eyes, he saw a crowd of about twenty people gathered below the cage, clustered around it like a swarm of bees.
Most of them were Roamers, a rough-looking gang—bearded, wild haired, wearing a variety of rags and furs.
A tall woman strode up to the cage and leaned forward to stare between the slats. She stood well over six feet tall, naked to the waist except for crisscrossing cartridge belts over her blue-tattooed breasts. Tattoos writhed all over her bare arms and torso, like a formfitting body suit imprinted with fantastic designs.
She wore green camouflage pants and high-topped boots. Her black hair was cropped to her scalp except for a crest that sprouted up six inches from the center of her skull. The ends of it were dyed a bright purple. Silver-studded red leather bands encircled her wrists. She cradled a heavy Stoner M-207 machine gun in her muscular arms.
At one time her blue-eyed face might have been pretty, but that was before it was disfigured by the wide cicatrix scar indenting her left cheek like a fault in snowy terrain.
She stared speculatively at Grant, and Grant gazed at her. Neither person spoke for a long moment, then the woman turned and nodded to her companions. “Yep, it’s him all right. It’s Grant, just like Shuma said.”
Grant stirred uneasily. “You know me?”
The woman turned back to him. “We’ve never been formally introduced. We traded shots about eighteen years ago, in the Great Sand Dunes hellzone. You ’member that?”
Grant did, and the memories weren’t pleasant. He and a Magistrate squad had been ambushed by a group of surprisingly well-armed Roamers. He touched his left cheek. “I give you that?”
She uttered a spitting sound of derision. “Shit, no. My first husband did, back when I was a sprout. Claimed I was steppin’ out on him. Hell, I was only fourteen. But I kilt him for it all the same. Had me six more husbands since then.”
A bell of recognition chimed faintly in Grant’s memory. “Didn’t you used to be called the Merry Widow?”
The woman grinned in genuine amusement. “Called that still. Glad to find out I still have a rep…wasn’t sure with all this fuss made over that Shuma bastard and this SOB of his.”
The derogatory tone in the woman’s voice caught Grant’s attention. “You’re not a part of it?”
The Merry Widow shook her head. “Not yet. Brought my people here to check the whole thing out. Lot of other clans I have problems with are here. Can’t say I’m too inclined to take orders from a mutie, neither, much less a fuckin’ scalie.”
Grant inched closer to the bars. “You’re only about half right.”
Lines furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
Grant eyed the Roamers standing behind the Merry Widow and asked, “Are all these your people?”
She nodded.
“Can you trust them?”
“Trust ’em to do what?”
“Not to sell you out.”
“Why would they do that?”
Dropping his voice to a whisper, Grant said, “Because I’ve got some information that you might find pretty interesting. But I think it should it be for your ears only.”
The Merry Widow opened her mouth to retort, closed it, then turned, sweeping the ragtag band with a challenging stare. She made a brushing gesture with her right hand. “Fade.”
Reluctantly, the Roamers shuffled away, some of them casting Grant resentful glares, others looking merely puzzled.
The woman turned back to Grant. “Spill, sec man.”
Grant felt the back of his neck heating with a flush of anger. “Sec man” was an obsolete term dating back to preunification days when self-styled barons formed their own private armies to safeguard their territories. It was still applied to Magistrates in the far hinterlands beyond the villes.
He swallowed his irritation and said lowly, “Shuma is just the puppet. A crippled mind-mutie named Esau really pulls the strings.”
The Merry Widow eyed him skeptically. “I thought that little slug was his ass-wipin’ servant or something.”
“That’s what he wants you to believe. He’s really the brains of the whole outfit.”
Taking a deep breath, Grant told the Roamer chieftain everything he had witnessed and been told by Esau. He didn’t embellish or even try to conceal the reasons he and his friends were in Manhattan. He spoke directly and honestly. He knew the Merry Widow distrusted him and didn’t blame her.
His own work with the Cerberus exiles kept him in a shadow world of danger and eternal suspicion, of sudden crisis and alarm, where human beings died in a covert war that ranged from the sands of the Black Gobi to the utter remoteness of a forgotten colony on the Moon.
When he was done, the woman’s scarred features were drawn in a troubled frown. “I don’t like that,” she murmured. “Not a’tall. But…”
She trailed off and after waiting a few seconds Grant demanded, “But what?”
The Merry Widow shrugged. “But Shuma has made plans for you, and everybody is lookin’ forward to it.”
Grant felt his stomach lurch. “Plans?”
The woman nodded. “Yeah, a big parade down the street with you as the main trophy. A lot of people in this camp don’t like you, Grant.”
The corner of her mouth quirked in a wry smile. “Go figure, huh?”
“Yeah,” he echoed. “Go figure.”
Contemplatively, she continued, “But a lot of people in this camp don’t like taking orders from a scalie in the first place, and they sure as shit won’t like it if they find out they’re really taking orders from a little runt of a doomie on crutches.”
Gusting out a sigh, the Merry Widow ran a hand over the purple-dyed tips of her hair. “Mebbe there’s something we can do about that. Lemme think on it.”
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