"He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
— Isaiah 2:4, KJV
The body of Jennifer Haze lay dormant and immobile on the floor in a puddle of matte red liquid. The liquid seeped into the gray carboncrete of Ames Research Station, fusing into the woman’s long black hair forming sticky locks. The scene looked as if there had been a violent altercation just a few minutes prior — an altercation out of which the prolific unlawful assassin for the first time failed to come out victoriously.
Another woman in the room, nodding large sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, held up a disposable camera to her eye and took a couple of pictures. She raised an eyebrow, shrugged and turned around to put the cigarette out into an ashtray in the corner of the room.
~ * ~
A woman left the cockpit of a Manta bounty hunter fighter that just a moment ago had settled on the landing pad of docking bay three of Ames Research Station. She wore sunglasses — immensely impractical in the already dimly lit corridors of the station — and lit a cigarette a second after her feet touched the floor.
Looking around, she thought about where to go. She had expected Haze to have been waiting for her, but there was no sight of any black-clad assassins in the area. The woman shrugged her shoulders and walked to the bar.
Once there, there was still no sight of Haze. She approached the counter and ordered something to eat and drink, then walked to a table and sat down. Bored and hungry she wondered when her contact would reach out. She took out her PAD, but with no message from anyone in it, she sighed and rested her head on her palm.
A couple of minutes later a waiter approached the table where the woman sat with two paper bags. A raised eyebrow emerged from under the frame of the sunglasses.
“Didn’t order to go,” she said.
“The lady you are looking for,” the waiter replied, “asked that you go to room 107 in the D wing, miss.” He handed her the bags and disappeared in the backroom of the bar.
The woman cursed under her breath and walked with the lunch to the indicated room. She knocked on the door. “Haze?”
The door opened slowly and she was greeted by the barrel of a .45mm Cyclone handgun aimed at her. The black-haired, purple-eyed woman behind the pistol dragged her in, then looked outside as if to check if she hadn’t been followed. Once sure that she had been the only one there, she closed the door and pulled the latch, still keeping the pistol aimed at her. “Arms out.”
After her target obeyed, she patted her down with her left hand. Not finding any weapons on her, she nodded, put the safety on and put away the firearm. “Hi, Petra, glad you could find the time.”
Swanson was slightly angry, but most of all confused. She sighed with exasperation and leaned against the wall. “Why the hell’d you choose such a horrible place, and why’d you make me come here without any guns?! And what was that supposed to mean?”
“Safety first.” Haze took the paper bags from Swanson and put them on the table. “Hungry?” she asked and threw her a tube of tomato-flavoured Synth Paste. “We’ve got business to discuss.”
“Business to discuss? You better bring your A-Game then, I don’t expect to eat Synth Paste without any classy drinks when you have business to discuss after dragging me out like this,” she said, nodding over at the Synth Paste.
“Classy drinks? I knew you as a Rogue, darling, how could have I expected that crossing the floor over to the Guild refines your taste in a day? I apologise for not having brought any merlot from Gallia, but as you might imagine, travelling is not the easiest thing now.”
Petra looked back at the woman and put her glasses into a side pocket of her jacket, revealing a glass eye inside the charred, left eye socket. She lit another, much-needed cigarette to calm down after what Haze had just forced her through. “Was there not a better place for us to discuss a simple business matter? You weren’t this picky a while ago, the bounty must really get to you if you’re willing to make such a fuss about a simple meeting between old friends, Jennifer.”
“No, actually, this place is perfect for it. And the business proposition is very simple — you kill me, and then we split the bounty on my head. What do you say?” Haze replied playfully. "Maybe you'll have enough then to fix up that butchered eye of yours."
“I... wait, what? And how would I even split the money with you once you’re dead? I’m not sure I feel comfortable killing my friend just like that. You know, that sounds cruel even for me. I’m sure there’s something else we can do,” Petra said, awestruck by what she had just heard from Haze.
Haze chuckled and rolled her eyes. “I guess it is good you went into the Guild, I doubt you would make much of a career elsewhere with that kind of approach to problem-solving.” She crossed her legs and continued. “I’ve had enough of shooting. I’m getting old. I want to retire. So, we stage it, take some convincing pictures. You send the pictures to the LPI and they, fingers crossed, forget to do their due diligence. They get excited, shower you with gold and prestige. And I disappear.”
She rested her head on her palm and gazed at Petra hypnotisingly with her purple eyes.
“You out of all the people in the Liberty’s underworld... Want to retire? I’m hearing things right?“ Petra spoke with a noticeable hint of disbelief. After a momentary pause, she continued. “I’m not against it really, it gives me some of the publicity I think I should be getting. But are you sure they’ll believe us? I haven’t been registered in Liberty for that long and even getting that paperwork done was a real hassle. What’s the endgame of this, where will you go?”
“I’ll become a quant at Interspace,” Haze replied in a tone that signified it was none of Swanson’s business, although what she said was not that far off from the truth. “And it is not a matter of whether they believe us, but rather whether they believe you. You have to put on a play and make this convincing. That’s what you’re getting your hundred mil for. Though given the reputation of the Guild’s turncoats, notorious for greed and betrayal, I’m sure they’ll cash in your thirty pieces of silver without any issues. After all, what they are concerned with is that I’m no longer there causing them grief. And I’m not going to. There are greener pastures than the underside of Liberty.”
“So you’re really not gonna tell me? I might visit you every now and then, you know.” she said with a smug look on her face. “I’m not the best actress, though I’m sure they’ll believe that I did indeed kill someone for money, even if it is a person as notorious and infamous as you are. So, do you have any ideas on how we’re going to convince the entirety of the LPI upper echelon that I indeed managed to find and kill you?”
“Well, let’s see. You used to roll with the Rogues. I used to work for you. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch for us to meet in person, just as we are now. You used a fake excuse to set up a meeting, we talked in the bar, and afterwards you followed me to my room and suffocated or stabbed me.” She spoke completely naturally about matters of death. “Stabbing might be better, actually. There should be a lot of blood. That’ll be more convincing. Then you take pictures, send them to Commissioner Nazumaki and wire half the cash they pay you to me. And then you forget that you’d ever known me.”
“You think that’ll work? What am I supposed to show the police, pictures of you laying around in tomato sauce? They’re dumb, I know, but do you think they’ll buy that?”
“It will work. But only this time, so if you ever are in a situation like this in the future, I suggest that you try something else,” Haze replied, smirking. She knew well that in this case Isla was forewarned and the entire plan was set up meticulously enough for it to succeed.
“Well, I guess we can try this, but do you have anything that looks like blood enough for them to buy the whole story?”
“I used to do stage magic on New London for a while. A long time ago. That’s what I used,” she pointed at the tomato synth paste tubes. “Mix with water and it looks like the real thing. But also, this is Ames. Kepler. Not much light. I doubt it will be visible in the pictures.”
Haze noticed that Petra looked like she wanted to ask more questions. The assassin stood up. “Shall we, then?”
~ * ~
Haze breathed in sharply, after a minute of holding her breath for the pictures to be consistent. “Awful,” she said with disgust as she was getting up. Her clothes, hair and hands were sticky and smelled of tomatoes. She took the camera from Petra and looked at the pictures. “Convincing enough for me.” Nobody who saw her in person would be convinced that the paste concoction was real blood, but the way it looked in the pictures, the light and everything — it was perfect.
After silently looking at the pictures for a while, Petra responded while trying not to laugh. “You were right, you really do look dead in those pictures! So, I wire these over to the LPI and that’s it? You sure you wanna drop out of business and abandon the underworld of Liberty just like that? Shame to lose one of your caliber, I’m sure you’d have made a career.”
Haze raised an eyebrow, still smothered in red paste, giving her a rather comic look. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the good guys now? How about you go do your part then, instead of wondering who or what the underworld of Liberty is going to lose. Send this to the LPI tomorrow. I have to take a shower.”
Once the door closed behind her own assassin and the steps went quiet in the hallway, Haze cracked her knuckles. She pushed away the thoughts of margaritas on a Curaçao beach and focused on the room before her. First, she quickly took all of her clothes off and placed them into an opaque, polymer bag. After washing her hands, she also carefully removed her trademark purple eye lenses and threw them in the bag, too. She glanced around the room — she would clean the fake blood up later.
Shivering, she stepped into the shower and let the hot water run down her body.
After a few minutes, once she relaxed a little and the experience had started to become tedious, she turned the water off and reached for two bottles standing on a little shelf inside the cabin. She mixed the liquids from both of the bottles together and meticulously worked the mixture into her hair.
Having turned on the water, she looked down and saw the water briefly turn black under her feet. She rinsed her hair more thoroughly this time and raised one lock to her eyes. She expected to see black, but instead she saw pale blonde. She chuckled and then sighed.
Jennifer Haze was dead, flushed down the drain of an Ames Research Station shower.
Parts in grey by @Lucas. Parts in violet by @"Jennifer Haze".
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