Alita

by Pat Cadigan

In the next moment, all the Paladins were down and Chase was gone.

  “Pause,” Chiren told the screen.

  “What the hell?” Vector said.

  “I could play it in extreme slow-mo so you could see all the details, but you wouldn’t like it any better. Chase’s adrenaline spiked when the other Paladins surrounded him, so he laid them all out.”

  “Why?” Vector grimaced. “They’re all on the same team.”

  “He felt threatened. He acted too quickly for second thoughts,” Chiren said. “It took me two days working around the clock to repair all the damage.”

  “Can those guys play tomorrow night?” Vector asked.

  “Yes, they’re all fine. But Chase is gone. He’s out there doing God knows what. Picking fights, no doubt. He’ll probably end up with a price on his head.”

  Vector sat back in his chair, took the napkin off his lap and tossed it over his unfinished dinner. “Which some Hunter-Warrior will collect after looting the body. There goes our chip, probably to those northland scumbags. I should’ve taken out all six of them, but I thought it would look excessive.”

  “Maybe one of your street rats’ll get to the body first,” Chiren said. “Then you can buy it back from them.”

  “This is all your fault,” Vector said. “You screwed the chip up instead of perfecting it like you said you would.”

  No, actually, my mistake was letting you talk me into putting a prototype into the cyborg body of a mercurial young man barely out of adolescence, Chiren told him silently. She sighed again.

  “Well?” he snapped. “How are you going to fix this? What hurts Motorball, hurts me and everyone around me.”

  Chiren raised one perfect eyebrow. “Am I included in that group?”

  “You hurt yourself when you screw up,” Vector told her. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I could go out and search for him,” Chiren said. “Maybe with a big butterfly net.”

  Vector’s eyes narrowed. “For someone who claims to have no sense of humour, you smart off like you think you’re funny.”

  “Would you rather watch more video?” Chiren said. “There’s a sequence where he tears off his trainer’s cyber-arm and—”

  “Don’t tell me—he beats him over the head with it,” Vector said flatly. “Does he ever do anything else?”

  “He’s dangerous, but not innovative,” Chiren said.

  Vector told the screen to shut off. “I’ll tell my people on the street to find him. Discreetly.”

  Chiren’s eyebrows went up. He thought his street rats were discreet? “Even if you find him in the next fifteen minutes, I doubt he’ll be game-worthy by tomorrow night.”

  “We’ll see.” Vector nodded at her plate. “If you’re done, why don’t you go slip into something more comfortable. I have a few calls to make before I join you. I won’t be long, so wait up.”

  “If you want me in the pit tomorrow, I need to get some sleep,” Chiren said.

  “Fine. Don’t wait up. I’ll wake you.”

  Just what she needed—more mediocre sex. Chiren got up and left the room, wishing she didn’t know he was watching her ass. Damned stilettos.

  * * *

  Vector called Gamot on voice-only and explained that he wanted a covert search. He’d have preferred to use Soledad, but when he called her, he got a brief recording saying she was unavailable, which hung up on him without inviting him to leave a message. He made a note to look into this and see what was keeping her so content that she could shrug him off. But first he had to get his rogue Paladin put to bed.

  Which reminded him.

  * * *

  Afterwards Chiren lay with her back to Vector, pretending to be asleep. Why had he bothered? His heart hadn’t been in it.

  But then, his heart never was in it. As far as she could tell, he didn’t have one, only a mechanism that told him what would pay off and what wasn’t worth the salt in his sweat. Not that she’d ever seen him sweat outside the bedroom. The penthouse was like a refrigerator and she could practically see her breath in the limo. Maybe the air had to match the temperature of his blood.

  In any case, it didn’t last long. Afterwards he got up, put on his silk pyjamas and robe, and went back to the office as if this had been a coffee break. Fine with her.

  * * *

  Hours later Vector stood beside the bed having a nightcap and watching Chiren sleep. She was lucky she was so good at what she did. As long as she kept making winners out of his Paladins, he could put up with her being such a diva. But she had really let him down when she’d lost the Paladin and the chip. He hoped for her sake this wasn’t a portent of things to come. The moment she became more trouble than she was worth, he’d toss her down his own garbage chute, and that fall would be a hell of a lot harder than the one from Zalem.

  But right now, she was still useful. Her and the kid with the crew—Hugo. For some reason he kept forgetting the kid’s name, maybe because he was such a nobody.

  At least the kid wasn’t a diva. When Hugo screwed up he didn’t start going on about this problem or that problem. And even if the kid wasn’t a genius, he was smart enough not to make the same mistake twice.

  It occurred to him then that he ought to encourage Hugo to hang around Ido’s clinic more. Maybe Ido was working on other things he’d like to talk about. The poor guy would be lonely now that his daughter was dead and his wife had traded up. Hugo could act like he wanted to be Ido’s protégé. Scientists loved having protégés, didn’t they?

  Vector went to the window and tapped the control to make it transparent. Nobody else had a view that was so almighty vast. He didn’t bother looking up at Zalem. At night it was only a darker shadow in the night sky. By contrast, Iron City looked like a spread of glittering jewels.

  The flying city was supposed to be so wonderful, a better world full of better people. But if Chiren and Ido were typical of Zalem’s supposedly better population, Vector wasn’t impressed.

  CHAPTER 15

  He should have hired a nurse much sooner, Ido thought, watching Gerhad fine-tuning Courage’s cyber-arm and gossiping with Spirit. He and Chiren should have hired one when they’d first opened the clinic. It would have taken so much pressure off them. Except he knew Chiren wouldn’t have welcomed a ground-level outsider into any part of their lives, not even to help with patients. Working with someone born at ground level, as if she were one of them? She might have left him sooner, taking their daughter with her. But then maybe their daughter would still be alive—

  Ido shut the thought down hard. He would never know, and he had plenty of real things to worry about. Then he realised Gerhad was looking at him expectantly. “I’m sorry?” he said, a bit embarrassed.

  Gerhad traded glances with Spirit. “I was just asking what time you thought you’d be back, and do you want me to wait for you? But if you don’t leave, it doesn’t matter.”

  Heat rushed into Ido’s face. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he said.

  “Who doesn’t?” Gerhad said. “Think about it while you’re out.” She made a small shooing motion at him.

  Ido nodded, taking a few steps towards the door. “Call me if—”

  “I need you.” Gerhad made a larger, more vigorous shooing motion. “Go, already, or all the good stuff will be gone before you even get to the market. We need more servos.”

  “We always need more servos,” Ido assured her. “Okay, I’m going. For real now.”

  Ido left by way of the residence so he couldn’t stop and talk to patients in the waiting area. He felt a mixture of guilt and relief about leaving, mostly guilt. But Gerhad had assured him she could handle the afternoon’s appointments, which were all adjustments, fine-tuning or diagnostics. And she was, after all, an experienced ER nurse. He hadn’t left his patients high and dry, and he wasn’t dumping his responsibilities on Gerhad so he could goof off. But he did feel guilty about lying to her.

  It wasn’t a total lie—he really was going to look f
or servos. Mainly, however, he was leaving to meet with Ajakutty, who had called him out of the blue to say he had a lead on Chase.

  In the last few days rumours had begun to circulate about the super-fast Paladin going AWOL. Vector had denied it, telling people his newest superstar was still in training and when the time was right he’d hit the track and play a game that no one would ever forget. When the other players had asked him what was really going on, however, Vector told them to worry more about themselves.

  “It’s not like we expect him to be honest with us,” Ajakutty said. “Vector lies all the time, about everything.”

  The two of them were sitting in a small café on the edge of south-town. Ajakutty was practically unrecognisable in mufti, and Ido realised he had never seen him completely out of Paladin gear. Without blades or armour, he looked almost slight to Ido. No one in the place gave either of them a second look.

  “Be that as it may,” Ido said, looking down at his coffee, “I don’t understand why you called me instead of Vector about this.”

  Ajakutty looked pained. “Well, it’s complicated. If I went to Vector and said I knew where the new guy is and what he’s been up to, that’s me telling him I caught him in a lie. I don’t play well enough to get away with that. What do you think he’d do?”

  “Nothing good,” Ido said sympathetically.

  “I’d wake up on the Prefect’s doorstep in a box of bicycle parts—and not my bicycle either.” Ajakutty shook his head. “I know you said you’re not coming back, and I respect that. But when I thought about who I could trust—” He shrugged. “I thought about just not saying anything and letting Vector find out on his own. That’d be the safest choice. But the new guy—he hasn’t played a single game yet, and all he’s ever done in practice is tear everybody’s arms off and beat them over the head with them. Nobody wants to be on the same team with him. I sure don’t, lemme tell you. But he’s a Paladin. He’s one of us. Vector’s acting like there’s nothing wrong with him. Except there is, and it’s bad. I think it’s that new chip.”

  Ido gazed at the other man, hoping he didn’t look as surprised as he felt. That was more than he’d ever heard Ajakutty say in one go. Nor had he ever heard Ajakutty express this kind of concern for anyone, let alone someone he barely knew. But then the only time Ido ever had contact with him was in the pit during a game or a practice. He only knew Ajakutty the Paladin, not Ajakutty the man.

  “I’m sorry,” Ido said, “but I’m not sure I can do anything. I didn’t put the chip in. Chiren did.”

  “You guys used to work together. I thought maybe you’d know what she did wrong.”

  There were any number of things Ido could have said to that, but he decided not to burden Ajakutty with any of them. “If I find him, I’ll try to talk him into going back to Chiren so she can take care of him.”

  Ajakutty looked disappointed.

  “The problem is, he’s not my patient,” Ido said. “If I did anything else, Vector could quite rightly claim I was interfering with one of his players.”

  Ajakutty’s disappointed expression intensified. “If you came across him lying in the middle of the street, twitching and buzzing in a pool of cyber-blood after a truck hit him, would you just leave him there so you wouldn’t be interfering?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Ido said as kindly as he could.

  “I think it is,” said Ajakutty. “Only now I have to get to the stadium and put on my game face and all the stuff that goes with it.” He got to his feet, pushed the chair in, and suddenly his expression softened. “I’m sorry, Doc, I shouldn’ta put you on the spot like that. Forget I said anything.” He hesitated. “But if you wanna know where he’ll be tonight instead of on the Motorball track, I sent the address to your phone. Don’t ask me how I got it. Things get going there about midnight.”

  “Ajakutty, wait,” Ido said. The Paladin turned back to him. “If you feel like stopping by the clinic for any reason, you’ll be welcome. After hours is best. I’ll have more time.”

  Ido thought for a moment that the Paladin was going to hug him. “Thanks, Doc,” Ajakutty said. “And don’t worry—I’ll be discreet.”

  Ido watched him leave the café and climb onto a gyro parked out front at the curb. Then he looked at his phone. The address Ajakutty had given him was halfway between the café and the edge of the scrapyard; how convenient.

  He had another coffee, telling himself that after he drank it he would go back to the clinic and finish out the day with Gerhad. He definitely would not go picking through the south-town edge of the trash pile looking for servos. And even if he did, he would not stay there killing time until midnight.

  If, on the other hand, he got caught up in what he was doing and somehow later ran into the AWOL Paladin who, for reasons of his own, agreed to give him the chip, that would simply be a lucky break.

  * * *

  The address wasn’t as easy to find as he’d thought it would be. He passed the entrance at least twice before he found it, a door in the middle of a narrow passageway between two buildings that might have been erected specifically to be rundown and empty. There were generations of graffiti on the boarded-over windows, tags layered on tags layered on tags.

  Inside, glow-in-the-dark arrows on the walls pointed to a stairway leading down. The arrows disappeared after three flights; they were no longer needed. Ido could hear the sound of many voices below. When he finally reached the bottom, Ido estimated he was at least seven storeys underground.

  The beefy woman stationed at the foot of the stairs was a head taller than he was. She was wearing a short pleated skirt, an impossibly clean white blouse and a tie in a Windsor knot. Her hair stood straight out from her head in all directions, stiffened into spikes that looked sharp enough to impale flesh. Ido recognised it as some kind of nostalgia fashion trend.

  The woman looked down at him as if he were the most uninteresting thing she had seen. “Weapons,” she said.

  Ido was baffled. “Excuse me?”

  “Weapons. Got any weapons?”

  “No,” he said. “No weapons.”

  She nodded at the shoulder bag slung across the front of his body. “What’s in there?”

  “I was trash picking.”

  “Get anything good,” she said languidly.

  It took Ido a second to realise it was a question. “Well, just this—” He fished a partial servo out of the bag.

  “Cool,” she said in the same utterly bored tone. “Hand.” She held out her hand and Ido put his in it. She produced a stamp and rolled it over the back of his hand. “That says you got here unarmed. Unarmed’s to the left as you go in. Or take your chances on the right. Up to you.” She shoved him through a doorway into an enormous dark room.

  The warm air was heavy with alcohol and sweat and too many people too far underground. Ido felt as if he couldn’t breathe deeply enough. He couldn’t do this, he thought. He had to get out before he keeled over—

  A gust of cold air suddenly blew down on him from overhead, lasting just long enough for him to take a single breath before it cut off. Maybe if he stayed right where he was, there’d be another one.

  “Hey, you,” said someone much closer to Ido than he’d have liked. He turned to find himself nose-to-nose with a sweaty male face that looked mildly homicidal. “Move. Don’t be an air hog.”

  Ido gave ground, standing on tiptoe to look over the heads of the crowd for something bar-like. In the centre of the room bright-white spotlights shone on a raised rectangular platform bounded by three rows of ropes on every side. It looked like an old-fashioned boxing ring. Ido had never actually seen one except in Zalem’s historical archives.

  He kept his eyes on it as he moved slowly through the crowd on the left side of the room. No seats—this would not be a sedate performance for audience applause. He just hoped everyone around him really was unarmed.

  Finally, he spotted a bar against the nearest wall. The man behind it was setting out glasses six at
a time using expandable hands. Ido recognised him; he had replaced some worn parts in those expander mechanisms.

  The man recognised him as well. “Hey, Doc,” he said with a smile. “Drink? On me—your money’s no good here.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Dunno,” the bartender said cheerfully. He opened a small bottle with his left hand and pushed it towards Ido. “On the house. Farm distilled. Won’t hurt you.”

  “Thanks,” Ido said and slid a few credits at him.

  “I told you, your money’s no—”

  “One professional to another,” Ido said. “Does this always happen here?”

  The bartender made the credits disappear. “Nope.”

  Ido leaned closer and lowered his voice. “This isn’t Factory-sponsored, is it?”

  “I’m just guessing,” the bartender said, sounding careful, “because I’m just a bartender and I don’t know anything, but no, it isn’t. Otherwise it wouldn’t be happening on the same night as a Game.”

  Ido looked around. There were no screens anywhere. “No one’s interested in the outcome of tonight’s Game?”

  “Just guessing again,” the bartender said, “because I don’t know anything—we’re clear on that, right?” He waited for Ido to nod before he went on. “It looks like some people want to lay bets without the, uh, Vectory taking a chunk.”

  “So who runs the betting?” Ido asked.

  “I keep telling you, Doc, I don’t know anything,” said the bartender. “I just serve drinks.” He nodded at the boxing ring. The bright lights overhead ran through a series of colours from red to purple and back to bright white before two cyborgs dropped down into the ring from overhead. The crowd roared in unison and surged towards the ring.

  The cyborg on the left—the unarmed side, Ido remembered—looked like a patchwork quilt of hardware. Every part of him was different, as if someone had cobbled him together from any old random components available. Like the Un-Coupler, Ido thought tensely, hoping he didn’t see anything familiar.

  The cyborg raised his mismatched arms overhead, acknowledging the crowd—the right one was a telescoping mechanism covered in dirty yellow plastic; the left was some kind of flexible cable that bent in any direction, at any angle. The armour covering his torso seemed to have been thrown on in a hurry; some of the pieces looked broken rather than cut and industrial glue had bubbled out from under the edges. All of it had seen a lot of use—every surface was scarred, scratched or scraped.