by Sean Platt
“I’ll look him up,” Nicolai said. “What about Long? The cop. What’s your read on him, other than that he wants to bend you over a sink?”
Kate thought, listening for her instinct. “I think he’s okay. Maybe fooled a little, but smart beneath it all, and already distrusts Omar. That’s a plus. Gun to head, I think we can trust him.”
“A rare good cop?”
Kate nodded for no one to see. “Believe it or not, I think so.”
“Stable. Sensible,” Nicolai said.
“Like a rock.”
Dominic was terrified enough to shit peach pits.
The roar sounded close, but he knew it was likely an echo from the long, concrete corridor. He wasn’t particularly concerned with how near or far the sound was, just bothered that it didn’t seem human. Or animal. It sounded like something twisted and evil: insanity with legs and lungs.
Dominic had the riot slumbergun at his hip like an old movie desperado. Leah was beside him, holding her weapon the same way. They were both standing near enough to the tunnel’s mouth to know they could shoot down the Organas like fish in a barrel, but far enough back that they shouldn’t be trapped in the confined space.
They’d spent the past sixty seconds discussing their strategy. This was the only way. Dominic had suggested not opening the cells and simply shooting into them, thus neutralizing the crazed Organas before they had a chance to claw and bite. It would work because the NAUCLU lawyers had insisted on Luddite imprisonment: There were no force fields to stop the slumbershots and only bars to shoot through. But there were two problems with that idea, and Leah, who could see the system from the inside thanks to the nanobots she’d left behind the Quark firewall, noted both immediately. If they slumbered the Organas in their cells, they’d need to drag their sleeping bodies all the way down to the buses one by one. And more troublingly, laws formerly passed by the NAUCLU had put systems in place to detect things like shooting captive prisoners. Somehow, the NAUCLU saw it as abusive. And if police brutality was detected, a second series of protections fell into place that were beyond police control. Beyond police control meant beyond the control of Leah’s nanobots…and she seemed to doubt that the arriving NAUCLU lawyers would simply open the cells then let Leah and Dominic drag their hippie prizes away.
It wouldn’t be long before Austin Smith and the others realized the deception and came running back. It was this or nothing. One big blitz, using drones to steer the wave of violent pacifists toward them. Only once the bodies willingly arrived could they do anything to usher Leo and his crew safely away…into the withdrawal cure Leo had already figured out and planned for.
Shoot.
Stack.
And run.
Dominic tried to remind himself that this had to have been Leo’s plan all along.
Leo had taught Dominic biology; Leo understood biology.
Leo had led a group of tech addicts; Leo had eschewed technology.
“Do you know what I keep thinking of?” Leah asked, keeping her gun’s belled end centered on the corridor with its growing noise. “Zombie movies.”
“Why?”
“There’s always a scene like this. An approaching horde, survivors trying to knock them all down.”
“Our guns are bigger,” Dominic said.
Leah smiled. Actually smiled. “Now that sounds like a line from a zombie movie.”
The roar grew louder. And louder. Dominic forced himself to recalibrate; he’d decided they should have been here already, based on earlier estimates. How many Organas were there? The shouts were too loud. But then again, if they were chasing a droid carrying what they thought was moondust, their apparent frenzy almost made sense. The droid had air. And the Organas were suffocating.
“Here they come,” Dominic said.
Now that he could see the Organas, the frightening sense of anticipation faded. A threat, he could deal with. The waiting had hurt most.
There was a small, tumbling droid ahead of the crowd, now visible at the end of the long concrete passageway. It seemed to flop end over end, but its middle was stationary like a gyroscope’s. A limb was sticking straight up, something that looked like a flag at its tail. The fake dust, in a bag. False salvation that made the shouting crowd stupid enough to run straight toward two people with raised weapons.
Leah discharged her slumber. A diffuse light spewed from the end, seemed to ricochet off the passageway walls and dissipated before it got anywhere near the Organas.
Dominic looked over. Leah no longer seemed calm or smiling. He knew she had a small stash of Lunis just as Dominic had hoarded his own, but now that the others were in sight, with Leo’s gray-braided head visible near the middle, she seemed just as ready to crack as they all were.
“Hold your fire until I say,” Dominic told her. “The bell end makes these things fire wide but not far. You have to wait until you see the whites of their eyes.”
Dominic forced a small smile, but Leah didn’t see it. She was staring straight ahead, her fingertips pressed white against the weapon’s thick gray body.
As they came closer, Dominic’s new resolve faltered. He’d seen these people not long ago, and although they’d been on edge then, they’d still been human. Now their humanity was gone. Their eyes were wide, focused on the droid. Their mouths were open, showing teeth. All had disheveled hair, mussed clothing, and injuries. Thanks to the asshole lawyers, these latent killers had been shoved into a few common cells while the worst of their addiction was hitting. Blood ran down necks and arms, from ears, lips and scalps. Some of their fingers, held out in needful hooks, looked broken and bent. Leo, whose eyes seemed slightly less crazed than the others, appeared to have lost most of an ear. Noses looked broken. Eyes were dark, like pits.
Zombie movies indeed, Dominic thought.
“Now!” he shouted.
Dominic fired. His first shot hit home, dropping five or six of the oncoming Organas as flat as if they’d been shut off midstride. Those behind the struck frontrunners tripped over their fellows, also striking concrete before shambling back up with fresh targets in mind.
They’d been chasing the droid, but now there was something else worth paying attention to.
People.
Two people, on whom they could probably smell Lunis.
The Organas came.
Leah fired. Dominic fired again. The Organas dropped in waves, but their charge was fiercer than Dominic had anticipated. He’d been in similar situations, mostly when younger, but the Organas weren’t following the same rulebook as those others. Usually, when riot police slumbershot into a crowd, those behind them evaded or scattered. At the very least, they slowed. But the Organas saw only targets and felt only need.
The droid skittered between Dominic and Leah, screaming through the rows of personal vehicles like something alive. The Organas, not far behind, approached like a wave. Dozens had fallen, but the stimuli were confusing; those who went down weren’t necessarily hit, and thanks to the dispersed blast cone, not all those who were hit went down.
“Back up! West, Leah, get back!”
While Dominic’s attention was on Leah, he felt a heavy body strike and pin him. He rolled, looked up, and saw Scooter, the village’s gentle giant. His teeth were bared. He sat up on Dominic’s chest, rearing back, fists raised.
There was a jump in Dominic’s timeline, like a glitch. He tried blinking but found it too painful. His face was numb, and Scooter was hauling back again with his left.
A blast. A flash of light. This time Dominic’s entire right side felt pins and needles. He’d taken a glancing slumbershot — Leah’s blast, which had left Scooter inert in the corner.
She kicked something at him. It was the slumbergun, which Dominic had lost when he’d gone down. His right side was sluggish, so he grabbed the thing with his left. Dominic managed another two shots before he could again fire with his dominant hand.
A mass moved toward Leah. Taking his eye off the thinning crowd, Dominic tu
rned to shoot. The three almost on Leah staggered and fell, but so did she. He’d hit her, too, and now he was alone.
Someone came from the left. A tall man with a crooked, bleeding nose. The gun was too long and too far to turn in time, so Dominic jacked backward and stuck him with an elbow. He followed with a jab from the gun’s butt and finally hauled around for a proper shot. The blast hit him hard, throwing the man against a parked hover.
Another shot.
Another.
And then Dominic realized the parking garage had gone mostly quiet, the minute ticking of his recharging slumbergun having become the dominant sound.
His gun was wrenched away from behind. He turned to find himself facing Leo Booker. Leo was, it seemed, just the right amount of crazy. His weaning plan must have fallen short at the end, because although he seemed to have enough clarity to understand the stolen weapon’s function and aim it correctly, he didn’t seem nearly cogent enough to remember Dominic, to know if he was friend or foe, or that he himself had orchestrated this all from the start.
“Do you know about the squirrels?” Leo asked, his mouth slack and drawling.
“Leo,” Dominic huffed, raising his hands in surrender. “You don’t know what you’re — ”
There was a blast. A flash of light. A whoosh of charged air. Then Leo was unconscious atop Scooter’s huge form, the slumbergun still in his hands like a cherished bedtime toy.
Dominic, his heart hammering, looked toward the slumbershot’s source and saw Leah on her knee, limp on one side, her eyes flagging as if seeking sleep. She’d pinned the large weapon against her chest and had managed to pull its trigger with what looked like the only responsive finger on a dead-fish hand.
“Dobt say ebbythig,” Leah slurred through numb, paralyzed lips, pulling herself erect on sluggish limbs, impossibly ready to soldier on. She looked down at all the Organa bodies, then at the buses waiting for stacked human cargo, then at Dominic. “Jubt gebt to work.”
Natasha was in her office, immersed, practicing. It was strange, Isaac thought, to see her closed door, know she was in her rig, and not feel jealous or angry. She hadn’t exactly admitted to cheating on him in a way that teeeeechnically wasn’t cheating out there in the Viazo, but the writing was definitely on the wall. And yet today, he knew she wasn’t cheating. In a strange way, what she was doing in there now was finally for rather than against him.
Well, it was for Micah, not Isaac. But it was about Isaac, and Natasha — bless her newly sweet, sometimes-dumb heart — honestly seemed to think the idea of involving her husband in an onstage trick at a big, predominantly Enterprise gala was cute rather than embarrassing. But how would Isaac look if he refused? Micah was excellent at saying something he didn’t actually mean, then making people feel guilty enough to go along with it, and then (and this was magic, if anything was) somehow divorcing himself from the thing he’d proposed in the first place, so he could later say it was another’s dumb idea.
Micah didn’t actually want to do a magic trick, Isaac knew. He wanted to guilt Isaac into getting on stage then make Isaac look stupid for forcing him to do it.
Fucking Micah.
If there was any consolation in doing the trick (because he had to do it now; Natasha’s practice in the other room was driving the nails in deeper), it was in the reason this bullshit posturing was necessary in the first place: Micah wouldn’t feel the need to make Isaac look stupid if Isaac wasn’t on a plinth and, in Micah’s estimation, in need of being knocked down.
Isaac smiled. Despite all of Micah’s manipulating and scheming, Directorate was going to keep its Senate majority at Shift after all.
Isaac considered finding a mirror so he could look himself in the eyes and pump himself up, but it only took thirty seconds before he realized there was no point. He’d won. Micah could bluster all he wanted, but it was finally Isaac’s chance to be the bigger man. Isaac never got to be the bigger man because Isaac never won decisively enough to end up in a position to turn the other cheek.
There was a dinging sound. Isaac looked up.
“Canvas, what is it?”
The apartment’s canvas replied in its soft voice. “You have an incoming contact request, Isaac.”
“Put it on the wall here.”
“It’s not visual, Isaac. It’s — ”
“Okay. Go ahead with audio. Track and follow.”
The canvas waited a few polite seconds after Isaac’s interruption then finished its sentence. “The request is for an immersion.”
“I’m not immersing for a damned call.”
“I’m sorry, Isaac. The request is urgent.”
“Who is it?”
“Identification is secured. Would you like me to say it aloud?”
“Permission granted. Tell me.”
“The caller is Aiden Purcell.”
Isaac’s internal temperature seemed to plummet to absolute zero. He felt twin urges: to run to his rig as quickly and subserviently as possible, or to sprint to the docked hovercar and flee. The latter was childish and would solve nothing, but hearing from Aiden Purcell now felt like getting a ping from Satan, informing a sinner that it was time to hand over the soul previously exchanged for fame and fortune.
“What does he want?”
“I have no information on that, Isaac.”
“Ask him what this is regarding.”
The canvas went silent.
Isaac began to sweat. That had been a bad idea. It would change nothing; whatever Aiden wanted, he wanted. Purcell wasn’t the kind of person who felt the need to explain himself, either, and he’d resent the question. It would also show Isaac’s weakness. Purcell had made his fortune (not to mention snagging himself a position in the above-Beau-Monde group he and Micah both knew existed but neither of them were dumb enough to discuss) by gathering data and knowing how to see through people better than any scan could. Purcell would see the request as time-wasting procrastination. It wouldn’t improve the forthcoming encounter, whether Isaac wanted that encounter to happen or not.
Instead of replying with Purcell’s answer, Isaac’s canvas began behaving erratically. A few of the Beam surfaces flashed, and a cluster of holo-projectors began to rotate. There was a distinct shimmer in the air as a small cloud of hovernanos prepared a local projection, to give whatever was coming more clarity and reality.
A second later, Aiden Purcell appeared in the living room, sitting in one of Isaac’s chairs, more tangible than any hologram Isaac had ever seen.
“Have some dignity, Isaac.”
“I didn’t — ”
Purcell picked at something on the knee of his bespoke black trousers. “I try to be polite, but let’s not pretend you need to accept my calls for me to appear.”
Isaac, unsure what else to do, stepped closer. “Let’s take this into an immersion.”
“That was my thought as well. But now I’m here and don’t want to move.”
Isaac’s eyes ticked toward Natasha’s office. He had no idea how long she’d be in there, doing whatever secretive thing she was doing. “Natasha could hear us,” he said.
Purcell held up a hand. A cigarette appeared between two fingers. He took a puff. Holograms were just holograms, but Isaac could clearly smell the smoke.
“That would be a shame,” Purcell said.
“Please.”
Purcell pursed his lips. “Fine. But that’s two favors you owe me.”
When Purcell was gone, Isaac forced himself to move fast. So much for running from this meeting. His living room wasn’t a simulator, and yet the scent of smoke would assault Natasha the minute she emerged. He’d need to burn something when he was done with Purcell to cover. And if he ran, he’d discover what else of Isaac’s the man could get into without permission.
Like taking over his optical sensors.
Or becoming an internal voice, forever whispering in his ear.
Or maybe a virus, digging into the soft data of Isaac’s Beam presence.
&nb
sp; Isaac jacked in, skipping all of the safety checks and every bit of the startup protocol he could bear to pass over. His entrance into the parlor simulation was so abrupt that his five senses screamed with vertigo. He staggered against the coffee table and had to catch himself by grabbing a bookcase.
Purcell was already seated, just as he’d been in the living room: lips slightly pursed, waiting for Isaac to move through his drunken idiocy and stop wasting his time.
“So,” the man in the dark suit said, puffing the same cigarette, “how are things with Natasha?”
“Fine,” Isaac stammered. He looked at the chairs. Was he supposed to sit? Was he allowed to sit? He honestly couldn’t remember most of his last meeting with Purcell. In his mind, he’d conducted the entire encounter on his knees, hat in hand, possibly offering to unzip the man’s fly and get to work.
“You didn’t tell me the whole truth, Isaac.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me you wanted to disrupt Natasha’s concert because it was a threat to distribution of party power and sentiment. You didn’t tell me you planned to personally storm in and save the day.”
“I…I had to send in real insurgents. Two birds with one stone. And people who, after they were arrested, wouldn’t raise more questions with the police. They were a genuine threat. I had to do whatever was necessary to — ”
“Oh, stop it, Isaac. You’re embarrassing yourself. And insulting me. You didn’t tell me what you’d planned to do — storming in to save your wife like Galahad on a white horse — but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know. Your profile’s largest area of strength is insecurity. Do you know how phenomenally rare that is? You’re someone who’s managed to take your astonishing depth of weakness and make it your personal touchstone.”
“Thanks?”
Purcell puffed his cigarette. “It’s not a compliment.”