The Mercenaries’ Tale – 1.13 Pursuit
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Blaise pounded on the door but there was no answer. She concluded that Doug either had drunk so much the night before that he had lapsed into a coma, or he hadn’t come back to his room. She ran a hand through her hair, contemplating whether or not she could (or should bother to) hack the electronic lock, when someone clearing their throat behind her made her jump.
Gratin was standing there, blankly watching her as he chewed on a waffle, his other hand holding a glass of milk.
“…How long have you been standing there?” she asked, annoyed that she hadn’t noticed his approach.
“Not long. You missed the breakfast buffet,” he stated.
“…I woke up late and decided to come down and check on Doug,” she explained.
“Mmmhmm,” Gratin eyed her appearance. She clearly hadn’t slept well as there were bags under her bloodshot eyes. She hadn’t bothered to pin back her hair or even brush it, her hat was crooked and her coat hadn’t been buttoned up properly.
“What?” she asked irritably.
“You and McCracken disappeared last night whilst I was relieving myself. I thought you both had returned here together.”
“No, we-” her eyes widened as it dawned on her what he had been inferring. “Oh gods no! Why would you even think that? He’s…he’s Doug!” she complained, her cheeks burning red.
“Well you are both humans who were incredibly drunk last night and you both appeared to be quite close for most of the evening,” Gratin replied nonchalantly, prompting memories of the previous night to enter her head. Lots of laughter, she and Doug attempting to drink shots with their arms interlocked, Doug attempting to convince her to hit the dance floor with him whilst she laughed at his goofy drunken dancing…
“I went to bed alone! Nothing happened last night, I’m only here now in order to see if he’s still alive in there!” she loudly protested, pointing to Doug’s door. Gratin frowned, placed the waffle in his mouth and settled his now free hand on the door.
“…He is not in there. It is empty,” he stated blandly after taking his waffle back out of his mouth.
“Oh. Where is he then?” she asked, feeling silly for having been knocking for the last couple of minutes.
“I do not know.”
“Can’t you just sense him?”
“Not exactly. I am sensing the innate mystical energies that cling to all living things. McCracken is not a mage so there is not much surrounding him and there are hundreds of people on board this vessel. He blends in with them too well. I believe the appropriate expression is ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’.” Blaise considered this, frowning.
“Great. I suppose we’d better look for him then.”
“He is quite capable of looking after himself,” Gratin remarked.
“Yeah, I know. I also know that he drank a lot last night. For all we know, he’s passed out in a pool of his own vomit or he accidentally threw himself overboard or something. I just want to make sure he’s breathing,” she explained. Gratin simply stared at her. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she glowered at him.
“How am I looking at you?” Gratin asked curiously.
“Like you still think Doug and I are having secret late night rendezvous. I still can’t imagine why you’d think that.”
“Like all fire mages, I pay tribute to Tserulia1,” he offered. Blaise had to pause to try and remember what Tserulia was the goddess of, besides fire magic.
“…You know how to make an awesome soufflé?” she guessed, confused.
“Well, yes, now that you mention it, but I was actually referring to Tserulia’s status as the goddess of romance rather than the goddess of the culinary arts.”
“Oh,” she was starting to feel embarrassed again, “so is this your way of telling me that you like to read those raunchy romance novels lonely housewives typically read?” she joked, hoping to cover up her mistake with some playful teasing.
“…I like to read lots of books,” Gratin answered, the joke going over his head.
“Has anyone ever mentioned that you’re a strange guy?”
“Constantly.”
“Right. Let’s…let’s just try to find Doug already,” she gave up, shaking her head as she made her way to the stairs, Gratin following her in his bemusement.
They had to wait at the bottom for a group of tourists to pass.
“…so just as he’s getting up, all these guys in fancy suits approach him. I thought they might be friends of his but then a fight broke out. He did pretty well for a guy that was outnumbered, especially since he only had the one arm,” the man at the head of the group was explaining to his companions, drawing the mercenary duo’s attention.
“He even managed to throw one guy over the deck! Shame things took a turn for the worst after that.” This prompted Blaise to shove past them and sprint up the stairs, towards the deck.
“Hey! Crazy bitch!” one of the group – a twenty-something girl – cried as she was nearly knocked over.
“I’m sure she’s very sorry. Excuse me,” Gratin stated as he squeezed past and chased after his friend.
As she approached the door to the deck, Blaise began to hug the wall and drew a pistol. Everything sounded quiet outside but she wanted to play it safe. Who knew what kind of people Doug had pissed off this time? She steeled herself and pushed through the doors, into the bright light beyond…
Everything was completely normal. Kids were playing, people were relaxing on the sun loungers and deckchairs. It was a perfect sunny morning. Blaise scanned the deck looking for anyone out of place. All she saw was an eight-year-old with an ice cream that had spotted her gun. He trembled slightly, the ice cream slipping off his cone and onto the floor. Blaise sighed and holstered her gun.
“No sign of him?” Gratin’s voice asked from behind her shoulder.
“No. I hate mysteries,” she muttered.
“He was here though,” Gratin observed, pointing to some smeared traces of vomit and an empty bottle of beer. Blaise knelt down to read the label.
“Belemian Quakerjuice. 100% organic. He was here alright.” She swept her gaze over the decking, spotting some scuffed shoe marks on the polished wooden floorboards and some red splotches scattered around here and there.
“Blood,” she said, “still wet. Couldn’t have been here for long,”
“What will our next course of action be?”
“I don’t know. If the fight were still happening then we’d be able to hear shouts or something. There’s not enough blood here to convince me that anyone was mortally wounded. He doesn’t pick fights he knows he can’t win anyway so I think he surrendered,” she reasoned.
“That gentleman did say he was outnumbered, do you think he was outgunned as well?”
“Probably. He left his bionics in his room. I want to believe he’s still alive.”
“The gentleman also mentioned something about suits.”
“Right, so who has Doug pissed off recently that belonged to a gang of suits?”
“Not Horatio’s men?”
“No, they didn’t know who we were and there weren’t any survivors left to describe us to anyone that stayed home.”
“Hmm. I believe there was only one other group we’ve dealt with recently who wore suits-”
“-The Dalminettis. Shit,” Blaise agreed.
Their conversation came to a halt as a man in a fine Italian suit talking on a mobile phone stepped out of the doors behind them.
“…So yeah, Business, we’ll send you the pictures in a bit. Tommy’s dealing with it. Still can’t believe we ran into him. He’s going to regret ever crossing us…yeah…yeah, don’t worry! We’re looking for his friends right now. They ain’t gonna see us com- oh shit!”
He froze as he realised that both Blaise and Gratin were in front of him and staring right at him. In a panic, he threw his phone at Blaise’s head and ran back the way he came. Blaise dodged by leaning slightly to the left, drew her pistol and leapt after him all in one smooth motion. She crashed through the doors and took aim. He was barging his way through a crowd of tourists. She couldn’t find a clean shot. Cursing, she sprinted after him, weaving her way through the crowd and down the busy staircase.
Gratin sighed. He used his ability to sense energy to track their progress as best he could as he made his way to the other, slightly less crowded staircase.
The man stumbled down the last couple of stairs having lost his footing in his haste, dragging some tourists with him. He ignored their angry cries, desperately scrambling across the floor. He found his feet again and flew down the hallway. Blaise was more graceful as she flung herself over the railing rather than fighting the crowd. There were gasps as she effortlessly landed and launched back into her run.
Gratin floated over the heads of those in his way. He calmly took the time to finish his milk before casually landing and pursuing the others at a brisk walking pace.
The suit skidded as he took a left turn, placing his hands on the floor to keep from falling on his face. He proceeded to barely avoid a cleaning trolley by side-stepping it and accidentally knocked an old woman to the floor as he darted down a corridor to his right.
Five seconds later, Blaise skidded around the first corner, vaulted over the cleaning trolley and sped past the old woman, into the right turn.
Gratin didn’t take the left turn, instead continuing his stroll down the first hall.
The suit took the next right turn available to him, only to realise after several paces that the mage was walking towards him. He fell on his rump in his attempt to brake, rolled over and scrambled to get away on all fours just as Blaise ran around the corner, coming to a halt in front of him, her pistol trained on his head. She was barely panting. The suit however, was out of breath and out of luck. He began swearing between gasps.
“Oh cut that out. All we want to do is talk,” Blaise told him curtly.
“I *wheeze* got nothing *gasp* to say!” he told her.
“That so?” she asked. She pounced on him before he had a chance to try and escape, forcibly yanking him off the floor and slamming him against the wall. Her left arm pinned him to the wall while she jammed the pistol against his throat.
“Let’s try this again. I have a monster headache, I’ve barely slept, my friend is missing, I’m pissed off and I’m running low on patience. I’m guessing you wouldn’t have ran if you couldn’t tell me where Doug’s been taken. Now’s the best time to tell me what you know. Unless, that is, you have a thing for agonising pain…” She let the sentence hang in the air, allowing him a chance to imagine all the nasty things she might do to him.
“I-I ain’t afraid of you!”
“Wrong answer. Gratin?”
The mage had caught up to them and, at her prompt, held out his empty glass so that the suit could see it. He held his other hand next to it. An emerald flame flared to life in his palm, and the solid glass quickly melted, dripping on to the floor. Letting the remnants of the glass fall to the floor, Gratin turned the emerald flame towards the suit’s face, moving it forward. The suit squirmed in an attempt to get away, sweat pouring down his face as the heat lapped up against his flesh. He could feel his skin beginning to blister as the flames inched closer and closer…
“Alright! I-I’ll tell you what you want to know! J-just leave me alone! P-please!” he begged.
“That’s more like it,” Blaise agreed with a smirk as Gratin backed off. She released the suit, playfully slapping him on the cheek as she did so while keeping the gun trained on him. The suit slid to the floor, still breathing hard.
“Well? Talk! Where is he?”
—
The Dalminetti Mafia were one of the City of Light’s less remarkable organised crime families. It composed of a core nine men, the ‘Old Boys’, and usually between thirty and fifty suited lackeys and thugs. Although conforming to the ‘typer mafia tradition of being Italian at its core, they would take on practically anyone wearing a suit and tie. Primarily dealing in racketeering, smuggling and strong-arming smaller businesses, the Dalminettis tended to try and avoid getting into turf wars with other gangs, partially out of laziness but mostly because they had enough common sense to realise that even a mob of boy scouts armed with sticks could probably overcome a group of their thugs just by virtue of having more team coordination.
This was why the number outside of the core nine would tend to fluctuate. If the Dalminettis ever entered a gang war, you could almost certainly guarantee that their numbers would drop significantly in a very short period. Then they would dial back their activity for a bit while recruiting, until some over-zealous thug decided to try and claim some turf belonging to another gang and the process would begin over again. Big Jim Dalminetti called this regular fluctuation ‘the Dalminetti Ecology’.
Occasionally there would be a thug who would show some adeptness at not getting offed in the semi-regular gang conflicts. If they stuck around long enough, kept their noses clean and didn’t go around causing trouble, they might just be accepted into being known as one of the ‘Old Boys’2. Unlike the rest of the Dalminetti Mafia, if any of these guys turned up on your doorstep you knew to expect to make an investment you hadn’t previously expected to that day, and if it was a bad day you could probably look forward to booking yourself into the hospital with some broken fingers or a smashed kneecap, if not worse.
Most of the Dalminetti Mafia were currently on the airship on the way to the annual gang conference at Casinopolis. The month before, tragedy had struck the mafia when the gang’s founder and primary namesake Big Jim Dalminetti had been killed in an unexpected confrontation in the gang’s headquarters while trying to hire some mercenaries to take out a rogue Triad group looking to muscle in on one of their key smuggling rackets. He’d made the mistake of trying to offer one of the mercenaries a light for their cigarette using his novelty cigarette lighter shaped like a gun. The mercenary hadn’t expected for a gun to be pointed at him, and thus returned the favour by punching Big Jim’s face through the back of his skull using their bionic fist. A one-sided fight later, and the mercs had escaped the Dalminetti hideout having killed the boss and several minor thugs.
Little Jim had decided to take an extended holiday to try and get over the loss of his big brother, and the majority of the Old Boys had stayed behind to lay low while sending the rest of their manpower to the conference via airship, just so the Dalminettis had a presence. It was also an excuse to get Tommy ‘Big Boy’ Bellarico out of their hair for a bit, because he was vying for a position amongst the Old Boys and, despite numerous attempts by the rest of the Old Boys to influence it, had so far failed to be killed in one of the many pointless turf wars the Dalminettis frequently engaged in.
—
“So that’s what happened while you were waiting outside the restaurant while we went in to see the mafia,” Blaise finished explaining.
“The question always lingered as to why we did not get that job,” said Gratin. “You were quite angry about it, and asking Doug just made him sulk and say ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. I did not pursue the matter. I did not think to, there was nothing particularly suspicious about your exit from the restaurant.”
“I was carrying a piece with a silencer and we were lucky to take out all the guys in the office quietly before they could raise the alarm. That’s why we came from around back, we had to climb out of the window because otherwise the thirty or so suits chilling downstairs with guns might’ve been tipped off.” Blaise rubbed her face with both hands. “You should’ve seen the novelty lighter, Gratin. It had a plastic red tip. It had the word ‘NOVELTY’ in block white capitals down the side!”
“Eh, Big Jim was asking for it anyway,” said the suit sat on the floor tied to the nearby shelving rack. Blaise and Gratin had dragged him into a nearby maintenance room full of cleaning supplies and various other items required for keeping the ship running. “He thought it was hilarious but we all knew it would cause someone to panic one day.”
Blaise kicked him in the ribcage. Her headache was down to a nagging, repetitive pang of pain.
“You said Doug’s being held up in the conference room on the third deck. How many of your guys are there?” she sighed. The suit spat a hunk of blood on to the floor, there was something small, pointy and white sat in it.
“About twenty-four of us,” he wheezed. Blaise pulled a pistol out of her holster in one quick movement. “Alright, twenty-six!” the suit blurted. Blaise cocked the gun with her thumb. “Oh come on, man! I don’t even like those assholes!” The gun wavered uncertainly, and then disappeared inside her coat.
“You’re right,” said Blaise. “A gunshot in a room this small wouldn’t help my headache. Come on then, Gratin.”
“Mistress Blaise?”
Blaise removed what looked like a few long metal pipes and a larger chunk from her coat and, after some furious twisting and clicking using her hands, a small sniper rifle appeared in her grasp. You could barely see the seams of where all the separate bits clicked together, it looked like it had always been a complete sniper rifle.
“Let’s go to work,” she said, slipping the rifle’s strap over her shoulder and clacking the rifle’s bolt, slotting in a cartridge3 of ammunition produced seemingly from nowhere.
- Tserulia is one of the six gods of Elementism. She is the goddess of fire but is also associated with romance, fertility, cuisine and the forge. Usually mages take careers closely associated with their element, each elemental god also becoming associated with those careers and the skills needed to perform them in return. ↩
- The Old Boys consisted of ‘Big’ Jim Dalminetti, his brother ‘Little’ Jim Dalminetti, Alfie ‘the Businessman’ Cartwright, Milo ‘Fingers’ Malloy, Joe ‘Average Joe’ Vekowski, Nigel ‘Ice Pick’ Pickeroni, ‘Two-Fingered’ Tony Stanza (who only had two fingers on both hands following a particularly gruesome Triad interrogation), ‘Three-Fingered’ Frank Willis (who only had three fingers on both hands as he was rescued just as the Triads were in the process of giving him the same treatment as Tony) and ‘Four-Fingered’ Fred Dower (who got off lightly during the Triad interrogation). Nobody ever had the heart to tell Fred that everybody has four fingers on both hands, especially as he was always a bit strange anyway. ↩
- Not a mistake: it’s a bolt-loaded rifle that takes five round cartridges. A rifle where you get more bullets per reload and the satisfaction of making that loud ‘ker-clack’ noise while reloading! ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne | November 10, 2013 at 12:00 pm | The Mercenaries' Tale | No comment
Tags: 'Big' Jim Dalminetti, Blaise, Dalminetti Mafia, Elementism, Gratin, the novelty lighter incident, the Old Boys, Tommy 'Big Boy' Bellarico, Tserulia