Iron Sunrise

THE DAMNED DON’T DIE

For this party Sam had repoed a dead light industrial unit on the edge of the reclaim zone. Wednesday didn’t go there immediately; she headed uplight a couple of levels to a boringly bourgeois housing arc, found a public fresher, and used the facilities. Besides getting the muck off her boots and leggings and telling her jacket to clean itself over the toilet, her hair was a mess and her temper was vile. How dare those scumbags follow me? She dialed her lips to blue and the skin around her eyes to angry black, got her hair back into a semblance of order, then paused. “Angry. Angry!”

She shook her head; the face in the mirror shook right back, then winked at her. “Can I recommend something, dear?” asked the mirror.

In the end she let it talk her into ordering up a wispy, colorful sarong, a transparent flash of silky rainbows to wrap around her waist. It didn’t fit with her mood, but she had to admit it was a good idea — her jacket, picking up on her temper, had spiked up across her shoulders until she resembled an angry hedgehog, and without the softening touch she’d have people avoiding her all evening. Then she used the mirror to call Sam’s receptionist and, swallowing her pride, asked for directions. The party was impromptu and semi-random; as good a place to hide out as anywhere, just as long as nobody tailed her there. And she had no intention of letting herself be tagged and followed twice in one night shift.

Sam had taken over an empty industrial module a couple of levels below the basement slums, spray-bombed it black, and moved in a bunch of rogue domestic appliances. Light pipes nailgunned to rubbery green foam flared erratically at each corner of the room. The seating was dead, exotic knotworks of malformed calcium teratomas harvested from a biocoral tank, all ribs and jawbones. Loud waltz music shotgunned into screeching feedback by a buggy DJ-AI attacked her eardrums. There was a bar full of dumb and dumber, the robot waiter vomiting alcoholic drinks, and passing out joints and pink noise generators. Sameena knew how to run a party, Wednesday grudgingly acknowledged. Decriminalization lite, prosperity-bound urban youth experimenting with the modicum of risk that their subtly regimented society allowed them. A cat lay on top of a dead solvent tank, one foreleg hanging down, staring at everyone who entered. She grinned up at it. It lashed its tail angrily and looked away.

“Wednesday!” A plump boy, mirrored contact lenses, sweat gleaming red in the pit lights: Pig. He clutched a half-empty glass of something that might be beer.

“Pig.” She looked around. Pig was wired. Pig was always wired, boringly religious about his heterocyclic chemistry: a bioresearch geek. Ten kilos of brown adipose cells full of the weirdest organic chemistry you could imagine boiled away beneath his skin. He kept trying to breed a better liposome for his gunge-phase experiments. Said it kept him warm: one of these days someone was going to light his joint, and he’d go off like one of those old-time suicide bombers. “Have you seen Fi?”

“Fi? Don’t want hang round Fiona! She boring.”

Wednesday focused on Pig for the first time. His pupils were pinpricks, and he was breathing hard. “What are you on?”

“Dumbers. Ran up a nice little hydroxylated triterpenoid to crank down the old ethanol dehydrogenase. Teaching m’self about beer ’n’ hangovers. What did you bring?” He made as if to paw at her sleeve. She ducked round him gracefully.

“Myself,” she said, evaluating and assessing. Pig, sober, would just about fill her needs. Pig, drunk, wasn’t even on the cards. “Just my wonderful self, fat boy. Where’s Fi?”

Pig grunted and took a big swig from his glass. Swaying, he spilled some of it down his chin. “Next cell over.” Grunt. “Had bad day thinking too hard this-morn. ’M’I dumb yet?”

She stared at him. “What’s the cube root of 2,362?”

“Mmm … six-point-nine … point-nine-seven … point-nine-seven-one…”

She left Pig slowly factoring his way out of her trap in a haze of Newtonian approximation and drifted on into the night, a pale-skinned ghost dressed in artful black tatters. Fancy dress, forgotten youthful death cults. She allowed herself to feel a bit more mellow toward Pig, even condescending to think fondly of him. Pig’s wallowing self-abasement made her own withdrawn lack of socialization feel a bit less retarded. The world was full of nerds and exiles. The hothouse of forced brilliance the Septagon system produced also generated a lot of smart misfits, and even if none of them fit in individually, together they made an interesting mosaic.

There were people dancing in the next manufactory cell, accelerated bagpipes, feedback howls, a zek who’d hacked himself into a drum-machine trance whacking on a sensor grid to provide a hammering beat. It was an older crowd, late teens/early twenties, the tail end of high school. There were fewer fashion victims than you’d see at a normal high school hop, but wilder extremes; most people dressed — or didn’t — as if they picked up whatever was nearest to their bed that morning, plus one or two exaggeratedly bizarre ego statements. A naked, hairless boy with a clanking crotch full of chromed chain links, dancing cheek to cheek with another boy, long-haired, wearing a swirling red gown that left his pierced and swollen nipples visible. A teenage girl in extreme fetish gear hobbled past; her wasp-waist corsetry, leather ball gag, wrist and ankle chains were all visible beneath a transparent, floor-sweeping dress. Wednesday ignored the exhibitionist extremals: they were fundamentally boring, attention-craving types who needed to be needed and were far too demanding to make good fuck-friends.

She headed for the back of the unit, hunting real company. Fiona was sitting on top of a dead cornucopia box, wearing black leggings and a T-shirt locked to the output from an entropy pool. She was chatting to a boy wearing a pressure suit liner with artfully slashed knees. The spod clutched a nebulizer, and was gesticulating dreamily. Fi looked up and called, “Wednesday!”

“Fi!” Wednesday leaned forward and hugged her. Fiona’s breath was smoky. “What is this, downer city?”

Fi shrugged. “Sammy said make it dumb, but not everyone got it.” (On the dance floor Miss Ball Gag was having difficulty communicating with some boy in a black rubber body-stocking who wanted to dance: their sign language protocols were incompatible.) Fi smiled. “Vinnie, meet Wednesday. You want a drink, Wednesday?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Fi snapped her fingers and Vinnie blinked slowly, then shambled off in the direction of the bar. “Nice guy, I think, under the dumb layer. I dunno. I didn’t want to get wasted before everybody else, know what I mean?”

Wednesday hitched up her sarong and jumped up on the box beside Fi. “Ack. No uppers? No inverse-agonists?”

Fiona shook her head. “House rules. You want to come in, you check your IQ at the door. Hear the jammers?”

“No.” When she said it, Wednesday suddenly realized that she could: the pink noise field was like tinnitus, scratching away at the edges of her implant perceptions. Does Herman talk to Sam? she wondered. “So that’s what’s got to Pig.”

“Yeah. He’s cute when he’s thick, isn’t he?” Fi giggled a bit and Wednesday smiled — sepulchrally, she hoped, because she didn’t really know how Fi expected her to respond. “ ’Sa good excuse. Get dumb, get dumber, stop thinking, relax.”

“You been at it already?” Wednesday kept her voice down.

“Yeah. Just a bit.”

“Too bad. Was hoping to talk about—”

“Shh.” Fi leaned against her. “I am going to get in Vinnie’s pants tonight, see if I don’t!” She pointed at the spod who was swaying back and forth, and working his way toward them. “Ass so tight you could drop him and he’d bounce.”

The music was doing things to him and to Fi that sent a stab of jealousy all the way from Wednesday’s amygdala to her crotch. She smoothed her skirt down. “What do you expect to find in his pants? A catfish?”

Fi giggled again. “Listen, just this once! Relax. Let go, ducky. Stop thinking, fuck like a bunny, learn the joy of grunt. Can’t you switch off?”

Wednesday sighed. “I’ll try.” Vinnie was back. Wordlessly he held out a can of grinning neural death. She took it, hoisted a toast to higher cerebral shutdown, tried to chug it — ended up coughing. The night was young, the air full of augmentation jammers and neuroleptics and alcohol, and the party was just beginning to mix down to the right level of trancelike zombie heaven that high-pressure synthetic geniuses needed to switch off and groove.

A long way down to the unthinking depths. She briefly wondered if she’d meet Pig down there and find him attractive.

In the end it wasn’t Pig; it was a boy called Blow, green skin and webbing between his fingers and toes — but not his cock and balls — and she ended up on his arm giggling at a string of inane puns. He’d slipped a hand into the slit in her skirt but politely gone no farther and left it to her to pop the question, which she did for reasons that escaped her in the morning except that he’d been clean and well-mannered, and none of her usual fuckfriends were around and free, and she felt so tense …

… and the poor lad had ended up staying with her half the night just to give her a back rub, after she’d finished screaming and clawing his buttocks in one of the antisound-curtained alcoves at the sides of the dance floor.

“You’re really tight,” he said in amazement, kneading away at one shoulder.

“Oh, you bet.” Her jacket had crawled into one corner and curled protectively around the rest of her gear. She lay facedown on the pad, damp and sweaty and postorgasmic and a bit stoned, trying to let go and relax, as he worked on her upper back. “Aaah.”

He paused. “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not really,” she mumbled.

After a moment he went back to prodding at the sore patch on her left shoulder blade. “You should relax.” Rub. “It’s a party. Was it someone here? Or someone else?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and he broke off from trying to get her back to relax.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, what do you want?” he asked, beginning to sound annoyed. “I could be out there.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Then go.” She reached backward and grabbed his thigh blindly, contradicting herself. “Stay. I’m not sure.” She was always bad at handling this, the difficult morning-after socializing that went with a one-off fuck with someone who she didn’t know. “Why do you have to talk?”

“Because you’re interesting.” He sounded serious, which was a bad sign. “I haven’t met you before. And I think I like you.”

“Oh.” She glanced over at the dance floor, legs moving in irregular strobing flashes of light only a meter or two from their sweaty nest. He smelled of some kind of musk, and the faint tang of semen. She rolled over on her back, fetching up against the padded back of the recess, and looked at him. “You got something else in mind?”

He stared at her sleepily. “If you want to swap links, maybe we could meet up some other time?”

I’m being propositioned! she realized, startled. Not just sex. “Maybe later.” She looked him up and down, mentally dressing him, wondering what it would be like. A boyfriend? Tension clawed at her, an unscratchable itch. She glanced at her hand. “My phone’s turned off, and I can’t switch it back on.”

“If that’s—”

“No!” She grabbed his hand: “I’m really, not, uh, being—” She pulled him towards her. “Oh.” That wasn’t the right answer, was it? she thought, as the slide of hot skin against her — and the interesting drugs they’d been taking — made the breath catch in her throat and brought a twitch of life to his groin. She reached out and caught him in her hands. “No swapping links. Just tonight. Make it like it’s your last, best time.” Cunning fingers found a nipple. “Oh, that’s too easy.” And it was back into the unthinking depths, with a frogman called Blow to be her skin pilot and a nagging tension at the back of her skull, banished for the moment by an exchange of lust.

Wednesday came awake suddenly, naked and sticky and alone on the foam pad. It still smelled of Blow. The dance floor action was going, but more slowly, the music ratcheting toward a false dawn shutdown. She felt alone for a moment, then cold. Damn, she thought hazily. He was good. Should have swapped—

There was a set of rings on the pad next to her. And a self-heating coffee can set solicitously close to them.

“What the fuck?” She shook her head, taking stock. What a guy. She felt a momentary stab of loss: someone who’d take time out from a party to give her a back rub after making skinny, even if she hadn’t wanted to talk … that was worth knowing. But he’d left a set of rings. She picked them up, puzzling. They looked to be about the right size. Still puzzled, she flipped the heater tab on the coffee and slid her own rings off, pulled the new set on, and twitched them alive. Instead of the half-expected authentication error, there was a tuneful chord and a smell of rose blossom as they glommed on to her implants and registered her as their rightful owner. Fully authenticated, with access to a whole bunch of stuff that was now instantiating itself in her implants from off a public server somewhere: “Wow! Hey, voice mail. Any word from Herman?” she asked.

“Retrieving. You have a noninteractive message. Hello, Wednesday. This is Herman. Your instructions are as follows. Do not go home. Go to Transit Terminal B. There is a ticket waiting for you there, booked under the authority of professor-gymnast David Larsen, for your participation in a student work placement project. Collect the ticket and leave this hab immediately. Retain these rings, they’re keyed to a new identity and set up to route packets to you via a deep market anonymizer. You cannot be traced through them. I will contact you in due course. Let me emphasize that you should not, under any circumstances, go home.” Click.

She stared at her rings in astonishment. “Herman?” she asked, biting her lower lip. “Herman?” Don’t go home. A cold chill brought up the gooseflesh on her back. Oh shit. She began fumbling with her pile of clothes. “Herman…”

Her invisible agents, the software ghosts behind the control rings and her implants and the whole complex of mechanized identity that was Wednesday’s persona within the Septagon network, didn’t reply. She dragged her leggings and boots on, shrugged into the spidersilk camisole, and held out her arms for the jacket; the sarong she stuffed in a temporary pocket. Jittery and nervous with worry, mouth ashy with the taste of overstewed Blue Mountain, she lurched out of the privacy niche and around the edge of the dance floor. Miss Ball Gag was gagged no longer, straddling the lap of Mister Latex, taking it hard and fast and letting the audience know about it with both lungs. Exhibitionists. Wednesday spared her a second’s snort as she slid past the bar and round the corner and out along a corridor — then up the first elevator she came to. She had a bad feeling, and the sense of unease grew worse the farther she went. She felt dirty and tired and she ached, and a gnawing edge of guilt bit into her. Shouldn’t she have called home, warned someone? Who? Mom or Dad? Wouldn’t they think she -

“Holy shit.”

She stopped dead and abruptly turned away from the through-route, heart hammering and palms sticky.

The corridor that led to her home run was blocked dead, the eery blue ghost glow of polis membrane slashed across it like a scar. Cops in full vacuum gear stood beside a low-loader with green-and-orange flashing spurs, pushing a mobile airlock toward the pressure barrier.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit…” The seconds spurted through her fingers like grease. She ducked around another corner, opened her eyes, and began looking for a dead zone. Fucking Bone Sisters … well no, this wasn’t their doing, was it? Dom games require a sub witness, a survivor. This was Yurg, he an being not happy and strangers’ boot steps clicking in the cold, wet darkness behind her. And Herman on the phone for the first time in years. She found a corner, stopped, and massaged the pressure points in her jacket, the ones she’d spent so much time building into it. It clamped together around her ribs like a corset, then she reached over and pulled the hood over her head. The leggings were part of the same outfit; she rucked them up, then stretched the almost-liquid hem right over the outside of her boots, her beautiful dumb-matter platform-heeled lace-up air-leaking boots. “Pressurize,” she said, then a moment later: “Fade.” The jacket rubbed between her shoulder blades, letting her know it was active, and the opaque hood over her face flickered into transparency. Only the hissing of her breath reminded her that from then on in she was impregnable, hermetically sealed, and invisible so long as she danced through the Bone Sisters’ blind spots.

There was a service passage one level up and two over, and she ghosted past the slave trolleys, trying to make no noise on the hard metal floor as she counted her way toward the door leading to -

“Shit and corruption.” The door handle was sealed with the imperious flashing blue of a police warning. Below the handle, the indicator light glowed steady red, a gas trap alert. Panicky claustrophobia seized her. “Where the fuck is my family?” She brought up her rings and called up the home network. “Dad? Mom? Are you there?”

A stranger’s voice answered her: “Who is this?”

She cut the link instantly and leaned against the wall. “Damn. Damn!” She wanted to cry. Where are you? She was afraid she knew. “Headlines, rings.” Anoxic sink hits residential street in sector green, level 1.24, six dead, eight injured. “No!” The walls in front of her blurred; she sniffed, then rubbed her eyes through the smart fabric of her hood.

The door was sealed, but the bottom panel bulged about ten centimeters out of it — an emergency lock. She knelt and yanked the red handle, stood back as it inflated and unfolded from the door and bulged out, until it occupied half the corridor. Fumbling at the half-familiar lock tags with her gloves, she unzipped it halfway and scrambled in. She was beyond panic, by then, just a high voice at the back of her head crying NoNoNoNoNo continuously, weeping for her while she got on with the job. Rolling on her back and zipping the entrance panel shut, she kicked her way forward into the lock segment on the other side of the door and poked at the display on the other tag. “This can’t be happening,” someone said. The pressure outside was reading fifty millibars — not vacuum, but as close as made no difference. Even pure oxy wouldn’t keep you alive at that. “If they’re in there and running on house gas, they’ll be safe until the cops reach them,” the voice calmly told her, “but if the bad guys hacked the house gas reserve, then dumped pressure overnight, they’re dead. Either way, you can’t help them. And the bad guys were going to wait there for you.” ButButBut.

Her fingers were buzzing, her rings calling. She held them to the side of her head. “I told you not to go home.” It was Herman. “The police have noticed an airlock trip. You have three minutes at most to clear the area. They’ll think you did it.” Silence.

Wednesday could hear her heartbeat, the swish of blood in her ears. An impossible sense of loss filled her, like a river bursting its banks to sweep her away. “But Dad—”

The next thing she knew she was standing in the corridor beside a slowly deflating emergency airlock, walking round a bend back toward human territory, away from the blue-lit recesses of the service tunnel. “Jacket, back to normal.” The hood dropped loose and she pushed it back, forming a snood; the leggings could wait. She walked away jerkily, tugging her gloves off and shoving them into a pocket, half-blind, almost walking into a support pillar. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. She slid back into the aimless stroll of a teen out for a walk, slowly reached up with a shaking hand to unfasten her jacket. It relaxed quickly, blousing out loosely around her. Oh shit.

Posessed by a ghastly sense of loss, Wednesday headed toward Transit Terminal B.

Centris Magna was a small hab; its shuttle port wasn’t designed to handle long-haul craft, or indeed anything except small passenger shuttles. Bulk freight traveled by way of a flinger able to impart up to ten klicks of delta-vee to payloads of a thousand tons or so — but it would be a very slow drift to the nearest ports of call. Only people traveled by fast mover. Consequently, the terminal was no bigger than the hub of Old Newfie, its decor dingy and heavily influenced by the rustic fad of a decade or so earlier. Wednesday felt a flicker of homesickness as she walked into the departure lounge, almost a relief after the sick dread and guilt that had dogged her way there.

She zeroed in on the first available ticket console. “Travel ticketing, please.”

The console blinked sleepy semihuman eyes at her: “Please state your destination and your full name?”

“Vicky Strowger. Um, I have a travel itinerary on file with you for educational purposes? Reference, uh, David Larsen’s public schedule.”

“Is that Vocational Educator Larsen, or the David Larsen who paints handmade inorganic toys and designs gastrointestinal recycling worms for export to Manichean survivalists?”

“The former.” Wednesday glanced around nervously, half-expecting blank-faced fuckmonsters with knives and manglers to lurch out at her from behind the soft furnishings. The wide hall was almost empty; grass, service trees, gently curling floor (it was so close to the axial end cap that the curvature was noticeable and the gravity barely a quarter of normal) — it was too big, positively threatening to someone who’d spent her youth on a cramped station.

“Paging. Yes, you have a travel itinerary. Payment is debited to the Outbound Project on—”

It’s now or never. “I’d like to upgrade, please.”

“Query?”

“Sybarite class, please, or the nearest thing to it you can find for me.” She’d checked her credit balance and she was damned if she was going to hunch restlessly in a cattle class seat for the duration of the transfer flight.

The terminal mumbled to itself for a while. “Acknowledged. Annealing to determine how we can accommodate your wishes — confirmed. Departure from bay sixteen in two hours and four minutes, local shuttle to Centris Noctis orbital for transfer to luxury liner WSL Romanov for cycle to Minima Four. Your connection will be in twenty-eight hours. Which option would you like and how would you like to pay?”

“Whichever.”

The terminal cleared its throat: “I’m sorry, I was unable to understand that. What economic system would you like to pay in? We accept money, approved modal barter, agalmic kudos metrics, temporal futures, and—”

“Check my purse, dammit!”

The terminal abruptly closed its eyes and opened its mouth. A small blue six-legged mouse poked its head out. “Hello!” it piped. “I am your travel voucher! Please allow me to welcome you to TransVirtual TravelWays on behalf of all our entities and symbionts! We hope your journey with us will be enjoyable and your business will be fruitful! Please keep your travel voucher in your possession at all times, and — squeep—”

Wednesday caught it.

“Shut the fuck up,” she snarled. “I am not in the fucking mood. Just show me to my cabin and fuck off.”

“—Please note that there is a security deposit for damage to TransVirtual TravelWays property, including fittings, fixtures, and emotivationally enhanced passenger liaison systems! We hope you have a pleasant voyage and a succulent profession! Please ensure your luggage remains under your control at all times, and proceed now to the green walkway under the cherry tree for transit to departure bay sixteen, where the VIP suite is awaiting your excellency’s attention.”

The mouse-ticket shut up once Wednesday transferred it to a pocket that didn’t contain any power tools or high-density energy storage devices. The path winked green in front of her feet, red behind her, as it guided her round a couple of strategically placed cherry trees and into a blessedly spartan metal-walled walkway that curved up and over the departure hall like a socialist-realist rendering of a yellow brick road.

Three hours to go. What am I going to do? Wednesday wondered nervously. Wait for Herman to phone? If he could be bothered talking to her — for some reason he didn’t seem to want to stay close. A twinge of loneliness made her clench her jaw. What am I letting myself in for? And then a stab of guilt so sharp she nearly doubled over fighting back the urge to vomit. Mom! Dad!

The VIP lounge was privacy-spoofed, a huge acreage of black synthskin and gleaming ivory patrolled by silent gray partition walls that flickered from place to place while her back was turned, ensuring that she could wander freely without seeing — or being seen by — the other transit passengers. A dumb waiter followed her around, all bright gleaming brass and scrollwork, eager to fulfill her every desire. “When do we board?” she asked.

“Ahem. If madam would follow me, her personal transshipment capsule is being readied now. If there are any special dietary or social or religious requirements—”

“Everything is just fine,” Wednesday said automatically, her voice flat. “Just find me a sofa or something to sit on. Uh, maximum privacy.”

“Madam will find one just behind her.” Wednesday sat. The walls moved around her. A few meters away the floor was moving, too. It all happened too smoothly to notice by accident. Something in one of her pockets twitched, then began to recite brightly: “We provide a wide range of business services, including metamagical consultancy, stock trading and derivatives analysis systems, and a full range of communications and disinformation tools for the discerning corporate space warrior. If you would like to take advantage of our horizontally scalable—”

Wednesday reached into her pocket and picked up her travel voucher by the loose skin at the scruff of its neck. “Just shut up.” It fell silent and drew its tail up, clutching it with all six paws. “I want a half hour call before boarding. Between now and then, I want total privacy — so private I could die and you wouldn’t notice. No ears, no eyes, no breathing gas mixture analysis, nobody disturbs me. Got it?”

The voucher blinked its wide, dark, excessively cute eyes at her. “Good.” She dropped it back in her pocket and stretched out on the huge expanse of padded cushions behind her. For a moment she wondered if she should have asked the voucher to leave her a bottle of something drinkable, then dismissed the thought. Privacy was more important just then, and besides, if there was something to drink, the way her luck was running right now she’d probably drink herself into a sodden stupor and choke on her own vomit. She held her hand to her face. “Get me Herman.”

“I’m here.” The voice was anonymous, bland.

“You corpsefucker,” she hissed.

“I can tell you what is happening,” said Herman.

After a moment, she made a noise.

“On Old Newfoundland, before the evacuation. I made a mistake, Wednesday.”

“No shit.”

“Like the mistake you made in attempting to return home. There were skin particles on the outside of your jacket, Wednesday. Both you and your friend. It will take at least four hours for the police forensics to identify your genome, but then you may be suspected of vandalism at best, conspiracy to commit murder at worst. Your friend will be eliminated from the investigation rapidly, but you may be unable to return home until the situation is resolved. Did you want that to happen to you?”

She couldn’t see anything. Her rings, biting into the palm of her hand, were her only contact with reality.

“What did you say?”

“I said.” She took a deep breath and tried to remember. “Meant to say. What makes you think this is home?”

“You live here.”

“That’s not good enough.” She fell silent. Herman, too, fell silent for a few seconds. “I would have protected your family if I could.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“I thought there were only two or three hunters. I was wrong. Earlier, I thought events were of no significance that were highly significant. I should not have left you alone here. I should not have let your family stay here, so close to the resettlement hub. I should not have let you settle in Septagon at all.”

“What do you want?” Her voice rose to a squeak that she hated.

“I want you to be my helper again.” Pause. “I want you to go on a voyage for me. You will be provided with money. There will be an errand. Then you can let go. It will take less than two hundred days, no longer.”

“I want my family back. I want…” She couldn’t go on.

“I cannot give you your parents.” Herman sounded infinitely remote, flat, ab-human. “But if you work for me, the hunters who took them will suffer a setback. And they will never trouble you again.”