by Pat Cadigan
“My mistake,” Tanji said. He was deadpan, but Hugo could see he was getting tense. Tanji ran hot sometimes; you had to know when he’d had enough.
“Hey, I’m just bustin’ your chops,” Hugo said. “Getting caught in south-town’s on me alone. I feel stupid.”
Tanji relaxed visibly. “That was lousy, you getting worked over and losing your mom’s bracelet to some punk-ass southie garbage-eater. I know you got nothin’ from your folks.” He put his hands in his pockets, looking self-conscious and awkward.
No one spoke for a long moment. Then Hugo said, “Well?”
“What?” Tanji’s eyes narrowed.
Hugo spread his hands. “I’m waiting for the insult. Unless you’ve gone soft on me?”
“Hey—dead mom,” Tanji said, his expression slightly appalled as well as surprised. “You don’t rag on a dead mom, everybody knows that. Oh, wait—I forgot, they adopted you from one of McTeague’s hellhound litters. You’re doing good just walking on your hind legs.”
“That’s better,” Hugo said. “For a second there, I was afraid you were gonna start talking about your feelings.”
“Aw, do you need a good cry?” Tanji asked.
“Jeez, get a room, you two!” Koyomi stepped between them and pushed them farther apart. “Or one of you buy me an iced coffee for making me listen to that crap.” She went into the café and they followed.
* * *
The three of them waited out the rest of the day at the far end of the counter that ran along the front window. A month earlier Hugo had done a deal with the café owner on some hard-to-get parts for some kind of fancy coffee machine. The owner was attached to it for some reason and didn’t want to get rid of it. Hugo found the right replacement parts and offered him a discount if he’d let Hugo and his crew hang out. The owner agreed, as long as they didn’t screw up his business. Tanji had told him he should have gone for the money, but having a place to get in out of the rain twenty-four hours a day turned him around. Besides, Vector paid them enough to make up for it.
In fact, Hugo had just had another meeting in the back seat of Vector’s limo, which had gone better than the last one. Vector still wasn’t quite over Hugo’s delivering late. A man with as many responsibilities as I have counts on a certain level of excellence, Vector had said, and it’s no small thing to be let down. Hugo knew he’d be hearing some variation on that from Vector for a long time.
Today, however, Vector had something he was a lot more pissed off about. It seemed there was a Total Replacement cyborg walking around not designed or built by anyone Vector controlled. There was a new designer-engineer in town, which was why Vector couldn’t get his hands on the specs. But from what he’d heard the TR was superior to anything Vector had.
No one seemed to know where this new designer-engineer had come from, except that her forehead was unmarked, so she hadn’t fallen from Zalem. Somewhere out in the Badlands was about as specific as it got.
The Badlands lay beyond the area surrounding Iron City where the Factory ran its arming operations. Out there the contamination from the War had decreased enough that fields and forests and even some wildlife had come back but it was deemed by Zalem’s authority to still be too high for human habitation. There were people living in the Badlands, although no one was sure who or how many or even where, as no one was sure how far the Badlands extended before becoming the wasteland that the Factory said made up most of the planet. If anything lived out there it was probably mutated creatures that roamed the poisoned landscape looking for things to eat alive.
The Factory wasn’t actually responsible for that last bit of speculation but it didn’t discourage it; fear of the unknown made people less whimsical and thus more easily controlled. All anyone really knew was people who left Iron City never came back, and no one thought that was because they’d found something better. There was something better, but it wasn’t out in the Badlands—it was floating in mid-air and Iron City lived in its shadow.
Sometimes people did come to Iron City from elsewhere—not often, but once in a while. They arrived without fanfare, unnoticed except by the Factory, which regulated every part of life in Iron City, and Vector, who kept track of anyone with an unknown pedigree because there was no such thing as a nice surprise.
Ms Cyborg Designer had arrived ten or eleven months earlier, a slightly dumpy woman nearing the upper boundary of middle age. Vector had thought she looked like a schoolteacher but he never made assumptions. In fact, she did teach for a while, in a private elementary school in northland, although she actually lived in a two-room dump on the edge of the Slum District.
After six months she quit and seldom left her sorry little apartment. Vector put her under surveillance, using a special team that none of his other employees knew about. They reported she seemed to be tutoring a select group of northland children who went to her place in the Slum District. Anyone else on Vector’s payroll might have left it at that, but this particular team operated on the premise that all behaviour was deceptive.
Eventually, after a lot of patient observation and some undetected breaking-and-entering, the team reported to Vector that the schoolteacher was a cyborg designer and engineer. She had built a Total Replacement cyborg with a number of improvements to the central nervous system. Said cyborg had registered for the next Motorball tryout session.
Vector was no engineer but he’d picked up a few things. Looking at Ms Designer’s schematic, his first impression was that the cyborg was too over-built to function—it was packing three times as many nerves in each part of the body. Everything fed into the spine, which had been completely reconfigured in a way Vector had never seen.
He’d told Hugo his new Tuner had been impressed. Chiren said it must have taken years of trial and error to get it right, which he figured explained why she hadn’t made one of these for him already. Thank God someone already had; it would save them years of work.
The problem was, Ms Designer didn’t want to sell Vector her design and she didn’t want to go to work for him. She had a group of six financiers looking after her expenses and they didn’t interfere with her work or try to boss her around. They didn’t even make her move to northland.
This little cabal apparently thought their TR was going to wipe the floor with everyone else at tryouts. Maybe he would or maybe he’d blow up on his way to the starting line. But the only way to be sure was to take him before he got to the stadium. Vector wanted that spine and all its connectors, along with anything else they could dig out of him. But the spine was the priority, backbone included.
Once he got the cyborg, Vector said, he wasn’t too worried about the northland bunch. Apparently they’d thought they could use the cyborg to take control of Motorball before knocking Vector out of his position with the Factory. As if they had a chance. The Factory didn’t want half a dozen people doing a job currently handled by one. One man, one word was all it took to get the job done. Any job.
All of this was far more than Hugo had ever wanted to know. Normally, Vector told him what he needed done and, one way or another, he did it. But since Hugo had been late—just that one time—he supposed Vector felt the need to explain why the job was important. Maybe if he got this one right, Hugo thought, he might regain all the ground he’d lost and everything would be okay again.
At least Vector hadn’t called off the other deal they’d made, and Hugo knew Vector could never have got where he was now by making promises he didn’t intend to keep. If the Factory could take Vector at his word, Hugo could too. And he’d never let him down ever again.
Hugo didn’t share all the details with Tanji and Koyomi. Tanji would have been bored and Koyomi would have asked what all that had to do with how they were going to do the job. He did explain that the cyborg might be more difficult to take down, but Tanji only shrugged.
“I’m at full charge,” he said, patting the sleeve where he kept his paralyser bolt. “I’m good for the next two days and I don’t think it’ll tak
e that long. Unless he’s shockproof.”
“Not that I know of,” Hugo said. “I don’t think even the doc could do that.”
“You sure like him, dontcha?” Koyomi said. “Doc Ido, I mean. You’re always hanging out there.”
“Not lately,” Hugo said. “I haven’t seen him since he patched me up. And I only went to him because I didn’t want to sit in the emergency room for seven hours with my split lip the size of a salami.”
“The size of a salami,” Tanji said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Are you asking to see it?” Hugo asked, deadpan.
Koyomi rolled her eyes. “When’s the wedding? I want to save up for your gift.”
“Tanji wants a salami,” Hugo said.
“Hugo doesn’t have one,” said Tanji.
“You guys are killing me,” Koyomi said. “Just kiss already, will ya?”
* * *
The three of them slipped out of the café shortly after eleven. The traffic in Iron City was starting to segue into late-night calm. Iron City was at its quietest in the dead of night, though it was never completely still. The Factory never slept; there was always a shipment to be packed or inspected, or things to be cut, sewn, glued, stamped, etched, painted, hammered, polished, assembled, inspected, and sent up through one of the supply tubes that extended from one of the distribution centres to Zalem like long spider legs. If you were close enough to one of the tubes, you could even hear a shipment whooshing upward.
But you could see and hear the sound of Zalem dumping their trash from almost anywhere in Iron City. Even at the busiest times of the day, when Iron City was wall-to-wall engines, blaring horns, kids yelling, and all kinds of business getting done, you could always hear Zalem flush the toilet.
Well, that wasn’t really what it was, of course; Hugo had heard Ido mutter the phrase and the expression had stuck in his head. If it wasn’t real excrement that came out of Zalem’s waste chute, it might as well have been for the way it felt at ground level.
And maybe from up there the feeling was mutual.
This only made Hugo more resolved. Just because you’d been born in a trashcan didn’t mean you had to stay there. People might think those were the rules. So you had to make your own rules.
* * *
“What are we doing here?” asked Koyomi as she got off the back of Tanji’s gyro. They were in the loading area of an abandoned warehouse behind the ruins of the old cathedral. “I thought you said the cyborg would be at some place back in the Slum District or near there, and it’s three or four blocks back that way.”
“He is,” Hugo said. “But he won’t be out on the street where we can get him for another two hours.”
“How can you be so sure?” Koyomi asked him.
“Yeah,” said Tanji, “what if he’s early? Or late? You got his schedule for the rest of the week?”
Hugo made a face at him. “I’ve been told where he’ll be and when. He won’t be out on the street before one a.m. It’s two blocks to the stop for the all-night bus to northland. We can pick him up on the way.”
“Then what?” Tanji asked. “Do we just take him apart on the spot and wave at anybody watching us? Or do you know any deserted streets on the bus route?”
“That’s the good news,” Hugo said. “We’ve got something even better.” He took them down to the end of the loading dock to something with a tarp over it. Hugo pulled it off.
“Oh, great,” Tanji said sourly, folding his arms. “You got half a truck. Did it come with half a sandwich? How long till you get the other half?”
“Oh, lighten up,” Koyomi said, walking around the narrow green-and-white truck. “Skinnies look weird but they’re good for getting through traffic. As long as it runs.” She looked at Hugo.
“It runs fine,” Hugo said. “How do you think I got it here?”
“Only you could buy half a truck.” Tanji jumped up on the step to look through the driver’s-side window. “It’s got a back seat. I guess it has to; you can’t fit three across.”
“The best part’s back here.” Hugo led them around to the back of the truck and opened the rear door. There was a winch with a lot of thick cable as well as heavy-looking restraints screwed into the floor. “We hook the guy up to the cable and pull him in, then strap him down and take him someplace else to part him out.” Hugo pointed. “There’s enough room for both our gyros too.”
“You got a place we can keep it between jobs?” Tanji said. “Like, in a whole truck, maybe?”
“We don’t have to use it for every job,” Hugo said. “Just tough ones. Like when there’s only three of us. And we might want to use it for other things, not just jobs.”
Tanji gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Like what?”
“I dunno,” Hugo said. “Maybe take it out to the Badlands. We could find something out there we couldn’t carry on a gyro.”
“Like what?” Tanji laughed again. “No, I know what you’re thinking. That thing in the lake wouldn’t fit in a whole truck, let alone this one.”
“There’s still lots of other stuff inside it,” Hugo said.
“Underwater.” Tanji looked appalled. “You can dive for treasure if you want. Count me out.”
“Something coulda floated to the surface or washed up on the shore,” Hugo said. “We haven’t been out there in a while.”
“Where’d you get this thing anyway?” Koyomi asked.
“Vector,” replied Hugo.
“Vector gave you a truck?” Tanji looked even more incredulous.
“Don’t you mean half a truck?” Hugo said. “And he didn’t exactly give it to me. He said I can use it whenever I need it.”
“He probably got tired of trying to find a place to park it,” Tanji said.
“What do you care, as long as he pays?” Hugo asked him evenly.
Tanji shrugged. “Good point. So Vector gives a truck. Can I drive?”
* * *
The cyborg finally came out of an apartment building in the middle of the block just before three A.M. The guy was larger than Vector had led them to believe. Anyone trying out for Motorball was going to be on the big side, but this cyborg was seven feet tall in his street body, with big, over-built shoulders and long arms shaped as if they were muscles. He reminded Hugo of Grewishka in his early days, before everything had gone bad for him and he’d been banned from the game for life.
That had to be why Vector wanted him so badly. A lot of people had lost big money on Grewishka’s last game, Vector included. Not enough to clean him out, but Vector hated losing. Hugo wondered what had happened to Grewishka, if he’d really gone back into the sewer like everyone said.
They were parked in an alley off the street a little over a block away from the bus stop, with Koyomi in the driver’s seat. She turned to say something to Hugo and he shushed her, telling her to cover up. Obediently, she pulled down her goggles, tied a bandanna around the lower half of her face, then pulled up the hood on her jacket. Hugo and Tanji did the same.
“Should I pull out?” she whispered. “He’s gettin’ close—”
Hugo shushed her again. “I’ll bang on the door. And don’t stall it too soon!” He and Tanji slipped out of the passenger-side door and watched the guy approach. When he was about ten feet away, Hugo banged the door twice and Koyomi pulled the truck into the street in front of the cyborg with a jerk.
“What the hell!” Hugo heard the cyborg yell.
“Sorry!” Koyomi said in a shrill, little-girl voice.
“Watch it!” the guy snapped. His footsteps went towards the rear of the truck. Tanji moved quickly around the opposite end to sneak up behind him. Hugo stepped out in front of the cyborg as he cleared the back of the truck.
The cyborg stopped short with an expression of bewildered surprise. Hugo felt the same—the cyborg looked so much younger in person. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, Hugo thought. Or maybe that was just the curly ginger hair and the freckles, because he was big,
husky as well as tall. Maybe they should have had two more of the crew with them.
“What the hell are you supposed to be?” the cyborg said.
Hugo tapped the cyborg’s knee with his paralyser bolt. He went down with a yell and Tanji hit him in the back of the neck with his own paralyser. The cyborg flopped on the pavement, arms and legs thrashing; he tried to call out but only made grunting noises. Tanji hesitated, then hit him again in the same place. Now the cyborg shuddered violently, as if the whole street were vibrating, and went limp.
Alarmed, Tanji touched a finger to his neck. “He’s alive,” he whispered to Hugo.
Hugo knelt down to take a close look at his face, lifting one of his eyelids. “Let’s get him in the truck.”
“Some super-cyborg,” Tanji said as he opened the back door. “Vector better not ask for a refund if his big deal turns out to be a hunk of junk.”
* * *
Hugo worried that the cyborg might start coming around after they got him strapped down in the truck, but he remained limp and unconscious.
Some cyborgs never lost consciousness, but those were the really tough guys. The adrenaline rush kept them wide awake, even if they were drunk or high. Hugo hated jacking one of those because they never shut up the whole time they were being separated from their body. They kept cursing and telling you all the ways they were going to kill you and you could barely hear yourself think. Sometimes they were still cursing when you dropped their core on the street. Hugo imagined they were still running their mouths when the Prefects picked them up and put them on life-support. Hugo always tipped off the Prefects after he dumped a core—anonymously, of course—but sometimes he thought the Prefects could find them just by the sound of their nonstop bitching.
Tonight, however, he’d have almost preferred to have the guy cursing and swearing at him. He really looked dead. Young and dead—whoever had built him had really messed up. Maybe it was all that extra stuff Vector said he had in his spine; the engineer had enhanced him, but it looked to Hugo like she’d forgotten to make a fighter out of him.