Logistics

Xin Zhihao’s eyes open. His body believes it to be dawn. The light of the local star is streaming in through his hotel window. Too high in the window to be the morning. Oh well. Andrew was supposed to have some kind of meeting this morning. If he’d felt like he’d needed Zhihao there, he would’ve woken the massive man up. He looks around his hotel room. There’s a half empty bottle of some clear liquid on the side table. With a groan, he lifts himself off the bed that is far too small for him and walks over to the table to down the drink. It burns slightly. Only vodka. He then takes a couple of steps over to the window. Too many people. He doesn’t want to deal with landing in that mess. Andrew’s room would be overlooking the alley. He walks out of his room and into his friend’s. Sure enough, below his window is an alley. Filled with garbage, but it’s not a problem if he craters a bunch of garbage. Hopping out the window, he begins his morning jog.

He has to go slower than usual on his morning jog. Too many people he is having to weave between to be breaking a hundred kilometers per hour. By the time his thirty minute jog is up and he’s back at the base of the hotel, Andrew is standing outside waiting for him. “Took you long enough,” the skinny man says with a smirk.

Zhihao shrugs. “Thirty minutes,” he replies.

Andrew hands him a plastic jug and opens the door for him back into the hotel. “The meeting was odd.”

Zhihao walks through the door, and Andrew follows. “Odd, how?” the former monster asks. He takes a sip of the jug. It’s much stronger than the vodka from earlier. Not a great sign.

Andrew presses the call button for the elevator. “Well, there’s evidently some big dealio going down. A whole massive mobilization against the Marauders.”

Zhihao raises his eyebrow at that. “What did those idiots do this time?” The elevator doors open.

Andrew pauses a moment as he enters the elevator and Zhihao follows him in. Anyone else, that might seem innocuous, but Zhihao knew his boss. Andrew’s looking for the words that answer the question without revealing any of the secrets he wants to reveal later. Inside, as he presses the button, the wiry man in a business suit finally replies, “Well, they are reporting that there is a return of, or a repeating of, some old ass event called the Insurgence. You heard of that?”

Zhihao shakes his head. The monster had fought in the last Insurgence, back when he was a soldier. And Andrew knew that, just as well as Andrew knew what the Insurgence was. Andrew was hoping Zhihao was too tired or frustrated to notice. “So, when you said a massive mobilization, it’s not just Astro?”

“Seems to be everyone,” Andrew admits.

Zhihao nods. The doors open. “Great, so you said no, right?” the massive man says as he exits the elevator.

“Of course,” Andrew says, in a tone that concerns Zhihao.

Zhihao presses. “Because with the Service involved and the history there and you know I’m still technically a wanted man to Hadrian.”

Andrew looks offended. “I said of course I told them no,” he repeats.

Zhihao walks into his hotel room and Andrew follows. As Andrew shuts the door behind them, Zhihao replies, “You did, I know. But you said it in a way that spells trouble.”

Andrew pauses, holding back a thought. Zhihao waits, drinking the strange drink from the jug. Finally, the gambler can’t contain it any more. “It’s just, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Here we go,” Zhihao groans.

“The Marauders aren’t in a good position right now to begin with, and there were no indicators of unification. They should be on the paranoid defensive.”

“Why do I even bother…”

Andrew, ignoring the man, keeps talking. “And why now. The Service and Lux are on the brink of war, it would be much more efficient to wait for a pair of months, build a bit of defensive infrastructure and a fallback, then strike after the two corps went to war.”

Zhihao puts down the jug. He is right. He normally is, but that was the whole reason behind how successful the Insurgence was last time. They struck out when all four companies were at war. Which made each company actively assume that the others were behind the attacks for a full standard year of precision strikes. And meant their response even once they learned what was going on was disjointed for another year. “How long have the strikes been happening?”

“Not long at all. They’re attributing the newest member of the FDC’s prior attacks to the marauders as well to make the timeline fit. And even then, it’s barely long enough.”

Zhihao takes another swig. “Great. I guess that means we’re going there anyway. Without a paying job for it,” he complains, shaking his head. His tablet is somewhere around here.

Andrew shrugs. “If you’re worried about the money, we can just stop by, well frankly any of the freeports. I’ll earn us our usual fees at the tables.”

“FDC’s involved, so let’s avoid Custodum. And the Service is involved, so my alcohol budget is doubled,” Zhihao tells his partner.

Andrew smirks and feigns confusion. “You have an alcohol budget?” Then, after a chuckle, he adds, “Just do the number crunching and figure out how much I need to make. Because something interesting is going on, and I’m going to focus on figuring that out.”

Zhihao starts taking off his sweaty clothes. “Okay, but can you do that elsewhere? You interrupted my wakeup routine. Can’t do that for too long, or we risk whirring it up from idle.

“Given where we’re going and who’ll be around, that’s less than ideal,” he turns around and adds, “Just remember you still have to do your job.” And Andrew walks out of the hotel room.

Taking the jug with him into the bathroom, he finishes stripping for his shower as he goes. He pauses for a moment, seeing the strangely organized and rigid lines traced all across his body, the scars of the life he is about to get far closer to than he’d like. Faded, but clearly visible to his eyes. Zhihao takes a deep swig as he turns on the shower at the maximum temperature. And he starts doing the math for associated costs for this trip.

Between the tickets to go out there, the three unassociated hotel bills to avoid notice, the ship rental once they were there, and the inevitability of needed to have themselves smuggled out, the number was not a pleasant one to consider as the shower bings to inform him it was at its hottest. Zhihao steps in, and is immediately disappointed by the scalding water. It burns against his skin as it washes the sweat off, but it isn’t nearly as hot as he prefers. It feels under forty, even though he has it set to forty-five as usual. He takes his fifteen minutes drinking in the hot shower, before he abruptly shifts temperature down. At least fifteen degrees felt close to accurate. He waited the thirty seconds for his pores to close, before he turned the shower off entirely.

Climbing out of the shower, he flips on the dehydrator. It’s loud, but he doesn’t mind. His mind is focused on the total amount Andrew would have to win to make a reasonable amount from this trip. Too much for any one casino. He tries his best to avoid Andrew getting banned anywhere. If left to his own devices, the kid would never stop. So, they could make up some of it here, on planet. Use some of that money to book passage to Portus Madidorum. Rent in Mad is too expensive, but it’s less complicated customs to go into Freeport Space there, and more to the point, the Madidorum casinos generally allow for more leeway on winning. Because they are much more heavily rigged. Hasn’t mattered to Andrew in the past, though. Pair of casinos there should finish covering their basic expenses for the trip, though if they’re going to be spending a night there, that’s an additional pair of hotels. They can make do with cheap shit in Madidorum, less likely to get themselves robbed. Then tickets to get them to Portus Conversorum. The ships are cheap to rent there, and they have enough smugglers passing through that it shouldn’t be much of a problem to make use of one after returning the rented vessel. The dehydrator finishing its work making him dry, Zhihao leaves the bathroom to find his tablet to start making arrangements.

Thirty minutes later, he has the first set of tickets booked for tomorrow afternoon, and everything else set up. He doesn’t have anything else booked, though he has them reserved without payment. Not ideal, but he doesn’t like dipping into their quote unquote retirement fund. He packs his things into his backpack, and steps out into the hallway. Andrew has probably gone elsewhere, but just to check, he enters the hotel room.

Andrew did go elsewhere, but he’d returned. And not alone. A pair of people intertwined in bed with Zhihao’s friend. “Goddamnit Andrew,” he complains loudly enough to be heard. “I leave you alone for what, an hour? You were supposed to be figuring things out.”

“What,” Andrew complains, “I went down to the gym to do a light workout to get the blood flow up, and ran into Ofelia and Marcello. And they had a fantastic suggestion for a different sort of workout to get the blood flowing.”

Zhihao sighs. One of the two, from the tenor of voice, probably Marcello, says, “Who’s your big friend?”

The other adds, “He’s more than welcome to join.”

Zhihao takes another deep swig. Or tries to, though the end of the swig has the dregs of whatever strange liquor was in the jug. Shaking his head at Andrew, the ex-monster informs his partner, “I need a drink. I’ll meet you at the front doors of Casino del Leviatano in an hour. Given cab timings, that gives you about forty to forty-five minutes to finish up whatever this is. We’ve got work to do, remember.” He walks out of the room and closes the door behind him. Sometimes being Andrew’s personal assistant is dealing with logistics of their day to day and their travels. And some days it is dealing with Andrew’s constant sidetracking because he has no self control. He walks over to the stairwell, and hops over the rail letting himself fall to the ground floor. Slamming into the tiles, some of them crack. Getting up, he heads out to the street.

He thinks back to the bar from last night. It’s in the wrong direction, but he has plenty of time. He checks both ways to make sure there aren’t too many cars on the street before he walks out into the middle of the road. Turning to face the bar, he begins to run. He weaves through the cars and other vehicles going far too slow as he covers the distance, just under two kilometers, in just over thirty seconds. He chop-steps in front of the bar to stop quickly, causing a few new cracks in the road. Then he walks into the bar.

“Um, we’re not really open yet,” the young woman behind the bar informs him as he enters.

Zhihao hunches over even more heavily to seem a reasonable height. “I just walked in on my boss in bed with two random people. I need a drink.” He puts a key on the table with an unfortunately large amount of money on it. His drinks budget.

She chuckles, picking up the chit and going back towards the register. “I guess you do. What will you have?”

“A double of the strongest thing you make,” he says, entirely seriously.

“I can do that for you,” she says. She plugs in the drink and scans the key, waiting for it to confirm that the chit is connected to enough funds to pay for the drink. She doesn’t trust him. Zhihao smiles. It’s good to not be known by reputation sometimes. It confirms that his drinks account has more than enough to pay for the incredibly expensive drink, so she gets to pouring. As she does, she asks, “So, large, strange, terrifying man who’s going to a bar at eleven in the morning, what is it you do? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I don’t mind at all. I’m a PA. For an idiot, evidently, but I try not to hold that against him.”