> “What can you offer the Salieri empire?”
>
> “I can chiefly offer three things: firstly, my capabilities as a financier. Secondly, my ability to hit a moving target in the dark at six hundred meters. And finally, an absolute lack of moral compunctions.”
>
> ~Anno DiBattista and DeMoss
Antoinette Violetta de la Mendacia chose her name for the sheer pompous frippery of it. It made her want to get a little fan and a giant wig, and say things like “oh deary me” and “frippery”. She’d chosen it in a fit of absolute pique when she first got her hands on this opportunity. It had stuck, but she’d made them call her Vio after a while.
She passed the background check because they were all criminals. A fake name was practically a qualifier.
Salieri’s Shadow was the first proper void-ship she’d ever been on. She’d been on shorter planet-hopping skimmers; the difference was very small, functionally. Cramped corridors, hatchways, pipes everywhere. Salieri seemed very fond of black paneling and gold trim.
She leaned forward, studying her face in the mirror. Her interview was in five. Angled electric-green eyes edged in black, sharp and straight as a razor blade. Freckles buried under makeup. Strict black double-breasted suit fitted pencil skirt. Her mechanical right arm was hidden away under the sleeves of her suit, but her hand was still matte plastic black. She tucked it into a pocket.
All hint of individuality had been smoothed and tucked and buried away. Perfect. Her mechanical irises spun open just a little further, and a warning appeared on her HUD. Time to go in.
----------------------------------------
“I’m bored with this fucking pony show” Vinnius said.
Anno DiBattista shrugged. “Dunno. It’s not too bad.”
The two Caporegimes sat in what Vinnius considered the Shadow’s worst combination café/shitty lounge/pub. Malfi Rose. Salieri seemed to like it, so the drinks weren’t the same swill you’d find on the lower decks, but the girls were boring and the music was shit. The pleasant smell of roasting coffee seeds permeated the place, but didn’t quite manage to cover the off-sweet of antiseptic.
Vinnius sort of preferred the cafes that didn’t pressure-hose their internals every weekend. Smelled like people.
But it was the closest café to the candidates. “They’re all so desperate or some shit,” Vinnius sighed.
DiBattista sipped at his 'caf. “So?”
“So they’re lying. And it’s always the same lie, and the lie is always whatever they think I wanna hear. I feel like a bar girl. Talking to some of em makes me wanna hike up my fishnets.”
“It’s an interview,” DiBattista shrugged.
“Yeah, but used to be Russo would handle this. I’m the shooting-shit guy.”
DiBattista sipped at his mug of 'caf. It wasn’t the same stuff they gave the Lord Captain and his execs. He happened to know there was a carefully painted icon of each senior crew member in the back, so the staff could pull out the good stuff if any of them showed. But this was an officer’s lounge, so his drink had a little leaf dribbled carefully in cream into the surface.
“Anyone that you like so far?”
----------------------------------------
> Vinnius sighed. He shuffled the papers in front of him for show. “Tell me about your greatest failure.”
>
> The dark-haired candidate froze, looked deeply uncomfortable. He’d been pretty smooth up till now. His name was “DeMoss”, though Vinnius was pretty sure it was fake, because the candidate wouldn’t respond to the alias unless you were addressing him directly.
>
> As the length of the pause grew, so too the candidate’s awkwardness. “I… once… shot my roommate’s pet with a flare gun.”
>
> Vinnius looked up. “What?”
> “How do you handle pressure?”
>
> Razer tilted his head. “There is no such thing as pressure. There are expectations, which flow like sand according to the wind. Only actions are real.”
> “You willing to relocate?”
>
> Reeve looked at DiBattista from across the table. It was a very communicative look: mostly unimpressed, but also with hints of confusion and an invitation to clarify.
>
> “Let’s move on,” DiBattista conceded.
----------------------------------------
“The kid is pretty funny,” Vinnius conceded. “Did he ever tell you how he shot a miniature coatlsnake with a flare gun?”
“The kid?” DiBattista picked up a forkful of cannoli and examined it by the dim golden light of a nearby sconce. “Which one?”
Vinnius frowned. He wasn't usually this face-blind. “The tall one, with the,” he struggled to describe remarkably generic features, “with the coat.”
DiBattista licked at the fork, nodded, and set to devouring the rest of his cannoli. “What happened?”
----------------------------------------
> “Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss,” DiBattista said.
>
> “Antonius believed that he could take the EastSide without contest from the Golden Peaches,” Hortensia told him evenly. “I disagreed. And when their territory came under our protection, they sent a delegation to discuss, in their words, respect. I was sent to smooth over the relationship.”
>
> DiBattista chuckled softly. “They sent a nephium bomb and seven swordsmen.”
>
> “I was on good terms with Hua, of the Peaches. I was not there when the bomb went off.”
>
> “So you betrayed him.” His tone was even, questioning, but not accusatory.
>
> “There was no betrayal,” she shrugged. “It was my duty to speak for him. This, I had done. What else comes, that was his duty.”
----------------------------------------
“You know what annoys me most about this whole goddamn thing?” Vinnius asked.
“Everything?”
“Yeah, but on top of that. We should be pulling from in the family.”
DiBattista nodded slowly. “Charis offered to send Nicola.”
Vinnius sighed. “You know the boss has never liked him. Besides, we need a lot more than a head for numbers. You know that. We need a talker with his ear to the ground. Half the time Nicola Cavalieri doesn’t know what set of titties is staring him in the face.”
“Could pick someone else from the homeworld.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Yeah, so we can pick another fucking Scurra in disguise,” Vinnius spat at the floor. A nearby waitress glared.
DiBattista coughed politely. That had been a messy incident, nominally his fault, which is why he ended up being the one to mop the blood off the floors. “Salieri wants an enforcer, too.”
“How do you know?”
“Cos he told me.” DiBattista drained his recaf.
“Fuckin hell, nobody tells me anything” Vinnius grumbled. “Least Russo kept everyone in the loop. What’s up for today? More questions?”
“Thought we’d mix it up.”
----------------------------------------
“The ship even. But not the crew, not if they – the crew cooperated, right?”
Ano DiBattista was bored.
“If they surrendered then that’s a loyalty thing. Implicit in the surrender is that Salieri is going to protect them, even from their former master.”
The candidates were all the same. Shady. Private. And to them all, an undercurrent of fear.
“Sure,” he said. “They surrendered.”
DeMoss was better at least than the short green-eyed girl. The one with the hair. There was no violence to her whatsoever.
“Then,” the candidate said expectantly, “yeah, if you trade a crew that surrendered to you, back to a merciless master they’re probably all getting executed. Crew’s got children in it. Families.”
DeMoss looked at DiBattista searchingly, trying to read a decision from his bearing. There was none.
How the fuck was he supposed to choose? DeMoss was okay, he figured. Unsteady. He’d killed before, DiBattista decided, but from desperation, or some other weakness.
“Awright, we’re a bleeding heart,” DiBattista murmured.
“It’s not mercy,” the candidate said, annoyed. “It’s faith. The ship runs on faith in Salieri.”
DiBattista looked the candidate over carefully. He smelled of luxury. Those smoky Sibelline spices. Good food and gun oil, but the classy kind, all incense and synthetic lubricants and blessed spices. The kind you’d shoot sport animals with.
Soft. So many of the candidates were soft.
“Next scenario,” he decided. “New planet, populated by tribals. Diplomacy has failed. What’s your next move?”
DeMoss considered. “Why did diplomacy fail?”
“You don’t know, they all just went cold. Maybe they saw yer cat and took superstitious issue to it.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
DiBattista stared at the candidate for a bit.
“Do I need them for anything?”
“Nah.” DiBattista made a few marks on his notepad. Finishing a sketch of one of the other candidates with blood splattering out of her neck. Clean cut.
“Ignore them." DeMoss shrugged.
Well that was on him. DiBattista placed a few blood spurts aggressively on his doodle. Boring fucking question, easy fucking answer.
“Nah,” the Mafia man told the candidate. “Can’t. They’re spreading the word. You’ve arrived. Maybe your rivals’ll hear about a coupla fuckheads making planetfall. Maybe they’ll spread the word and the tribals start making trouble.”
“So the tribals haven’t told anybody about us yet. How many?”
“Maybe five hundred or so.”
DeMoss closed his eyes. He inhaled for a moment. Exhaled.
“Kill them.”
Finally. DiBattista felt a little prickle along his spine at that. “Yeah?”
The candidate’s eyes were sharp. Steel-hard. “If they have decided Salieri is their enemy, let Salieri be their enemy.”
----------------------------------------
Vio was getting worried.
Her mechanical hand had a shock implement to it, and as a bad habit she’d gotten used to charging it and then sparking between her fingers. She made herself stop, clenching both plastic and flesh fists.
From the start, she knew she’d spend three days aboard the Shadow interviewing for the role of Seneschal to Scipio Salieri. They were two days in, and she hadn’t had a chance to particularly distinguish herself, because all of the tests and questions had been about money and killing people.
Vio was okay at money. Mostly other people’s money. And she didn’t like killing people. But there was one thing she could reliably do.
Her room was not large, but to her hiver sensibilities it may well have been a palace. Big luxurious bed with silken sheets and fat pillows. She’d asked for more pillows, and they had been delivered until the bed was an enormous mound of soft for burrowing into. So far, each morning four or five pillows would drop to the carpet below, and Salieri’s housekeeping service would see them picked back up and compiled in her mound for the next night’s sleep.
That meant that she would have to replace the piece of wall paneling she’d removed, nuts and bolts strewn across the floor. It hadn’t wanted to come out, so probably some creativity would be employed to put everything back.
From there she had wormed her way into the low-security end of the shipwide computational array. Some security cam footage, a couple comms lines. Nothing fancy. She had the shooting range scores, the financial analyses, and a couple sec-cam videos to watch.
The deacon had assured her that she’d done a fine job on the pistol range, but compared to the other candidates, she ran dead last on every combat score. Someone called Razer had topped the charts uncontested on all but the high-powered rifle range.
She wasn’t doing too poorly on her financial analysis – second place didn’t win any prizes in this kind of game, however. She’d written a quick cogitator script to crunch the numbers. Apparently a “DeMoss” had done the whole thing by hand, faster than her script.
Despite all this, a candidate named Reeve had had the most follow-up conversations going further and further up the chain. She sighed, tapped at the footage of Conference Room C43 on her dataslate, and sat against the wall to watch the Reeve interviews.
“Huh,” she said aloud. There was something familiar about the face in the room. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she felt she’d seen him somewhere.
The interview itself wasn’t very informative – he was certainly very professional. If it was her, she’d certainly hire him. But she was sure she’d seen him somewhere. Vio swiped at her screen to pull up her security credentials on the Salieri shipboard network. It was time to do some digging.
----------------------------------------
> The dataslate slid across the table.
>
> “Buy low,” Vio said. The clock ticked, the slate beeped. Numbers within parameters.
>
> DiBattista made a mark on his notepad. Solves everything with cogitator. She was -
> The dataslate slid across the table.
>
> “Honestly, is this the best rate you can get?” Reeve asked. “I could buy twice as much for half as much in the underhive.”
>
> “Shady connections?” Vinnius asked.
>
> Reeve laughed. “Normal connections,” he gestured to them, to the ship, to Salieri's would-be interstellar criminal empire.
>
> Vinnius shrugged. “Okay. More math questions up next. Gotta love em.” He was scoring-
> The dataslate slid across the table.
>
> Hortensia frowned. “Is mathematics the base criterion here? What of the skills of a negotiator?”
>
> Her numbers were slow. DiBattista shrugged. She was good at the talking part, but overall her performance-
> The dataslate slid across the table.
>
> The answers blended into each other. The response was fast. Correct. Most of em were correct.
>
> “Are those real numbers?”
>
> Vinnius blinked. It had been a long day, and he needed a drink. His head was starting to feel like it had been stuffed full of cotton.
>
> “What?”
>
> DeMoss gestured. “I mean, those are plausible supply numbers for a ship this size.”
>
> “Yeah they’re real,” Vinnius said defensively, and then realized he had probably committed some kinda breach of security with that.
>
> Fuck, he wasn’t cut out for this shit. “Awright, next math question.”
>
> DeMoss held up a hand. “Wait, wait. Something’s wrong with these supply quantities.”
>
> Vinnius squinted at him. “The fuck you going on about?”
>
> “Up till about,” the candidate considered, “three months ago. Supply high. You’re buying a lot of toilet paper. Selling it off? On inhabited worlds? That’s when the stockroom volume drops, but there’s no money coming back in the budget.”
>
> Vinnius rubbed his face. He squinted. The numbers were good, the candidate was doing - was doing good. He had three more questions left and then he could go home.
>
> “Someone was moving money through your supplies,” DeMoss said.
>
> Vinnius looked at him blankly.
>
> “Embezzling. Someone was embezzling.”
>
> Vinnius blinked. He turned this over in his head.
>
> The candidate pointed to yet another row on the finance table, and Vinnius concentrated enough that the numbers stopped swimming in front of his eyes.
>
> “Look,” DeMoss said. “It stops about three months ago.” He thought about it for a moment. “That’s about the time it takes to get from your homeworld to mine.” He paused for a moment. "When did you say the last Seneschal left this organization?"
----------------------------------------
Russo leaned back in his seat. Stretched his arms over his head, his legs under the table. He rubbed his hands together, cracked his knuckles. Tiny rituals, stacked one on top of another, but he knew them for what they were; an excuse to delay opening his correspondence.
She was planetside. The encrypted signals would transfer to his dataslate within moments. Close enough that they could have an actual conversation.
He opened the dataslate, and a little blip popped up on the lower corner of his screen. She’d been waiting.
He kept her waiting a moment longer. Poured a nice cup of amber whiskey into a cut crystal tumbler. He swirled the liquid, inhaling appreciatively. Russo wasn’t one for drinking. He had few vices. It was what made him such an effective Seneschal.
“Russo,” the blip told him. “What do you have for me?”
The screen still had the sinking Salieri fortune on it, a map of revenue and costs, account numbers and passwords. What was left after he’d begun discreetly draining it.
“Salieri,” he scribed into the device. He didn’t send the data; he wasn’t stupid, or even particularly disloyal. He coldly weighed all options once more, as he had been trained to do.
“What do you have for me?” he asked.
Arbiter Penelope Argos, interstellar Imperial enforcer, smiled triumphantly. "A clean slate,”