Chromed- Upgrade

by Richard Parry

  “That is why we’re going. To get the demon.” Laia looked at Zacharies. Please. Don’t fight him. It’s worse when you try. “We have no choice, and…” She leaned closer. “If the angel is there, we will be free. Together.”

  Zacharies nodded, breathing out. He looked as if he was preparing to lift something heavy. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She spared him a crooked, sad smile. Laia’s hand found his, and together they walked out to an Abinal baked warm and golden by an old sun.

  Chapter Three

  “I don’t know why you don’t go to the address, now you’ve got one.” Carter sounded distant, the link hissing between them.

  “You set the mission up, Carter. I’m just following through.” Mason coughed, wiping rain from his face. “I’m curious.”

  He stood outside a crumbling building, too far from Seattle’s high-rent district to attract buyers. Hell, even low-rent districts would be an upgrade. This is a home for illegals with bad luck. Rain lashed the front of the structure, giving old wood and concrete a glassy look. Five stories tall, and all of them ugly. He leaned against his Suzuki. The big bike felt warm from the run here. Mason left it on in case he changed his mind about going inside.

  “Curiosity isn’t a useful quality for you, Mason.”

  Mason smiled despite the weather. “Why’s that?”

  “Cats getting killed. You familiar with the expression?”

  “Rings a bell,” said Mason. “What I want to know is why a bartender at a shitty dive knew what you didn’t.”

  “How’s that?” Carter sounded more alert, a hard edge to her voice.

  “He said the rain was for sale.”

  “He had a head injury.”

  “And here I am at the place where you said an Apsel energy signature was detected,” said Mason. “An unauthorized reactor site.”

  “Following reactor signatures makes sense,” insisted Carter. “Someone’s trying to sell our shit. We’re trying to find out who, and by we, I mean you. I sent you to the place where one of our reactors was used. Do you see how much sense it makes?”

  “What doesn’t make sense is why a bartender said the rain was for sale.” Mason looked at the ruins around him. “The rain, Carter. Not a reactor.” His optics’ thermal showed no telltale heat blooms from bodies. Didn’t mean people weren’t cloaked, lying in wait.

  The casual strays who made this place their home were nowhere around. On a night like this, that suggested they’d found death.

  “You’re probably right.” Carter sounded as if she didn’t believe her own words. “Getting to the buyer is a higher priority. The reactor site can wait. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m already here. This won’t take a minute.” Mason looked up at the falling heavens. “I’ve got to get out of the rain.”

  “You’re within safe tolerance.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re sitting pretty behind a desk.” Mason ran a hand through his hair, examining the strands sticking to his palm. “You see this? Does this look like safe tolerance?”

  “It looks like a day in the chair. Relax.” Carter paused for a second. “Maybe two days.”

  “Maybe you should come out here and get wet.”

  “No thanks. Besides, you’re going to die of cancer first, remember? And he’s a bartender, Mason. At a place called Seconds, the most ironic bar name ever. He’s not the FBI.”

  “People in my profession don’t get to die of cancer.” Mason looked at the building’s dark and empty windows. A few stray shards of glass stuck to frames here and there, but the paint was long gone. The low building was an extravagance of an older world. Nobody put concrete into the ground unless they could get a hundred stories out of it.

  Mason thought he saw a face at a window, but it shimmered and vanished. “Look, screw the bartender. You work your way, I work mine. He’s one of my people.”

  “You don’t have people.” Carter snorted. “You’ve got an expense account.”

  “I think I’m getting symptoms.”

  “Like what?” Carter’s voice turned serious.

  “Check the feed. Was there a person in that window?”

  Carter was quiet for a moment while she checked the mission recording. “No.”

  “Right.” Mason coughed again. “Definitely symptoms.” He brought up a tactical overlay in the top corner of his vision, setting it to play back the feed from his optics.

  “Clever,” said Carter. “Checking the digital against the real?”

  “Something like that.” Mason saw another face at a different window, an eyeless corpse with a wet gash for a mouth. The overlay showed a window, dark and empty. “The overlay gives me a headache.”

  “You could quit.”

  “No one quits. You know that.” Mason walked away from the Suzuki, the bike powering down with a soft whine as the cowl locked into place. “You got a satellite view?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You’re working on it? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Christ, Mason. This isn’t Fisher-Price in space. I’m getting a lot of interference. There are other interests at work here.”

  “Metatech?”

  “Do you want the satellite, or do you want to know who’s trying to jack it?”

  “I want the satellite.” Mason walked up chipped concrete steps to the building’s double doors. An old wooden board lay against the steps, chipped paint advising Vacancy - Apply Within! He froze. “Wait. Someone’s jacking one of our sats? That might be a priority.”

  “You do your job, I’ll do mine.”

  “Jesus.” Mason glanced up as if he could see a rogue satellite targeting him. “I don’t want that thing pointed the wrong way.”

  “Have I ever let you down?”

  Mason didn’t reply. Carter had detailed stats on her mission performance, and it would be bad form to get into it with her now. Even if she’d dropped a catch, she’d make it look like he was the one supposed to catch it.

  He pulled the tarnished knob. It tore from the rotted wet wood door. Mason tossed it aside. It’s a good thing they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

  Mason put his shoulder to the door, pushing it. The door squeaked, sticking for a moment, then groaned low as it opened into the gloom of the foyer. Something like a rat, but bigger, scuttled for cover. The overlay showed it too, which gave him pause. What the hell was that? I do not want to meet the roaches here.

  He drew the Tenko-Senshin, clicking the weapon’s light on. Clear and bright, the beam played across the room. An old reception desk watched him, boxes for hotel mail rotting behind it. A rusty bell still sat on the counter next to a heap of mouldering machinery that might have been a register.

  “You’re going to die, and they’ll never find your body!” Carter’s screech echoed in his ears.

  “What the fuck, Carter?” Mason swallowed. “What the actual fuck!”

  “I didn’t say anything.” Carter’s voice sounded normal this time, laced with faint surprise.

  “Yeah. Yeah, you did.”

  “Curious. It’s progressing faster than I thought. With your augments—”

  “You didn’t just say I was going to die?”

  “No.” She paused. “I should have, though. Tactically speaking, you’re not in a good place right now. It might have been the EMP.”

  Mason played the beam around the rest of the room. A curved stairway led up. An ancient man with a rotting face watched from the top steps. Mason closed his eyes, shaking his head. When he looked again, the stairway was empty. Mason breathed a little easier. “I tell you what.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t say anything to me until I talk to you.”

  “Nothing unsolicited?”

  “Sure.” Mason nodded. “‘Unsolicited.’”

  “What if I see something?” Carter sounded doubtful.

  “Then you’re just going to have to let me handle it. It’s why Old Man Gairovald pays m
e the big dollars.” Mason looked up the stairway.

  High above him the roof was broken, faint fingers of moonlight touching the walls. Water was coming in from somewhere, the carpeted stairs sodden with it. “If I get out of this, I’ll take you someplace nice.”

  Carter’s reply was quiet, her voice uncertain. “Like where?”

  “Nowhere like this place, that’s for sure.” Mason coughed again, something warm and wet hitting his hand as he covered his mouth. He wiped his palm against his pants without looking.

  “Okay.” Carter paused, then her voice hardened. “Try not to get yourself killed. I don’t want to break in a new partner.” The link went dead.

  Mason put a foot on the first step, easing onto it. It creaked, the swollen wood giving easily under his weight. Not that way, then. What kind of asshole did business in a place like this anyway? A flash of lightning showed a ring of faces looking down at him. The overlay showed an empty stairway. He blinked a few times, rubbing his face with his free hand.

  The Tenko-Senshin’s beam bobbed across them, then they were gone. The hair on the back of his neck rose. “Definitely not the stairs. No problem.” And now, you’re talking to yourself.

  He checked the foyer again. A door behind the reception desk offered promise. It stood slightly ajar, a sign saying Staff Only in what might once have been gold letters. Mason walked to it, his feet scraping and crunching on debris. He crouched next to the door, shining his light at the floor. Scuffs showed where the door had been opened. He touched the rough ridges of the floor before he stood, leaning against the frame.

  Mason pushed the door slowly inward. Concrete stairs went down into the dark. He saw eyes blinking up at him, but the overlay called him a liar, the feed clear of hostiles. “Anyone down there?”

  Silence. He waited, leaning against the frame. The giant rat thing made a mad scamper across the foyer’s floor before disappearing again. Maybe the rat had the right idea.

  Running away isn’t what you get paid for.

  A hysterical giggle tried to break free. Mason clamped down on it. He pointed the Tenko-Senshin’s beam down the stairs. Peeling paper, the design faded, greeted him. A light switch, green with mold, was mounted at the top of the stairs. Mason clicked it a couple of times, the sound sharp against the background drumming of the rain.

  He reached into his pocket for a drone, twisting the sphere and tossing it down the steps. It bounced, a scattering of red lasing out as it tumbled down into the dark. The drone mapped the room, because surprises were bad in a situation where enemy syndicates had stolen your corporate assets.

  Mason waited as his overlay filled with the layout of the room below. He sealed the front of his jacket, shrugging as the helmet chattered out of his collar and lapped into place around his head.

  “There’s probably no one down there, Mason.” Carter’s voice was all business as the link came online.

  “I thought I told you not to talk to me.”

  “Your heart rate’s significantly elevated. I was concerned.”

  “You were what?” Mason put a foot on the stairs. Time to go down. “I think I misheard.”

  “Concerned.”

  “You got the satellite up?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’d be more concerned about that.”

  Carter sighed. “I can do more than one thing at once.”

  Something with a lipless mouth reached for him from the dark below. He blinked twice, feeling his heart kick against his ribcage. “It seems worse here.”

  “The satellite is worse here?”

  “No.” Mason coughed, feeling phlegm in his throat. “The … stuff.”

  “Stuff? What are you, five years old?”

  Mason leaned on the wall, his helmeted forehead resting against the peeling paper. He breathed in deep and slow, his hands shaking. He felt a little stab of anger at Carters’ words, then he grinned as the anger pushed back the fear. “Thanks, Carter.”

  “What for?”

  “Keeping it real.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Mason continued down the stairs, the beam of light pushing back the darkness in the basement. Water trickled from a crack in the ceiling, the old concrete chipped in spidery lines. He played the beam along the cracks. “You getting this?”

  “Yes.” There was a pause, then Carter cleared her throat. “I don’t think those cracks are that old.”

  Mason followed the cracks as they converged. He stepped past a support beam. It was charred and black along the side facing where the cracks converged.

  He continued until he found a body. It was covered with a layer of carbon, black from head to foot. The corpse curled in a fetal position. Water had mixed with the ash, making a pool of dark ink around the body. Mason checked the feed. The body was there in digital too. It’s real. Someone burned to death here.

  “I think we’re getting warmer.”

  Carter snorted. “Don’t you think that’s just a bit in bad taste?”

  “What? Oh. Sorry.” Mason tried for a smile out of habit. “Bad choice of words.”

  “Accurate, though. Find it, Mason. We can’t afford to lose this one.”

  Seven men came at him out of the darkness, eyes milky from the grave. Their shambling gate brought them into the Tenko-Senshin’s beam. Grasping hands reached for him.

  They were on the feed. These weren’t hallucinations. Dead men were coming for him.

  Mason squeezed the Tenko-Senshin’s trigger, the scream of the weapon deafening in the basement. The bright, angry blaze of the flechettes stabbed across the floor to the walking corpses. The heat from the weapon sparked and kicked at the air. One corpse ignited from the heat as the Tenko-Senshin pulled it to pieces.

  Silence. Flames rose from the floor where a fallen leg lay, the smell of burned meat filling the air.

  “Mason!” Carter’s voice was loud in his ear. “What—”

  “They were on the feed, Carter.” Mason coughed again.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You can see them, can’t you?” He walked over to a burned patch on the ground where an arm lay, cut and torn from the Tenko-Senshin’s barrage. He poked it with a gloved finger. “And you can see this.”

  “The dead don’t walk. We know the hallucinations are just… They’re an effect from the rain.”

  “This look like an effect?”

  “No, but… Wait. What’s that?” Mason’s optics flickered once, twice, then a reticule highlighted a section of an arm. “That tattoo.”

  Mason leaned forward, poking the arm with the barrel of the Tenko-Senshin. The tattoo was typical Marine-style, the falcon, globe, and anchor blurred with age. A barcode was underneath, the six-digit service number faded to illegibility.

  “Give me a second,” she said. “I’ll enhance that.”

  Mason’s optics flickered again, highlighting the barcode and service number. A section popped into relief as image enhancing algorithms kicking in. Carter made a low noise. “Are you…? Jesus. You’re humming.”

  “Yeah.” She went back to humming. “I love my work. What can I say?”

  “It’s hardly the time, Carter.”

  “Oh. Right.” She stopped humming as a chime sounded. “It doesn’t matter, we’re done. That arm belongs to… John Smith.”

  “John Smith.” Mason raised an eyebrow. “His name’s actually John Smith?”

  “Yeah. From Nebraska.”

  “John Smith from Nebraska. What’s his arm doing here? And when did he die?”

  “That’s the thing.” She downloaded a military service record to Mason. Pages flipped over in the top right of his overlay. “Hah. According to the Marines, he’s not dead.”

  Mason nudged the arm, then stood up. “Looks pretty dead to me.”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I’m a field agent. I didn’t study sociopathy.”

  “Sociology. I’m a sociology major. Amongst other thi
ngs.”

  “Whatever.”

  She sighed. “It’s got nothing to do with sociology. It’s logic. The reason why Specialist Smith doesn’t have a deceased date on file is because you only just killed him.”

  Mason needed to get into the chair. He wasn’t normally this stupid. “Specialist?”

  “Career Retention Specialist. It’s in the file.”

  “He was… Wait. He was in HR?” Mason looked at the darkness around him, then let the Tenko-Senshin’s beam fill the spaces between the columns with light. You’re babbling. Get your shit together. Only little kids are afraid of the dark.

  “It’s the Marines.”

  “I thought they shot people.”

  “They do. And they have an HR department to make sure they retain people who are good at shooting.”

  Mason let out a nervous laugh. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “I know you don’t like HR, Mason, but this is a bigger issue, okay?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Carter gave an exasperated sigh. “Talking to you is like talking to a child. You remember the atmospheric effect?”

  “Sure. The rain.”

  “Right, the rain. We figured it made you see things.”

  “It does.” Mason nudged the arm with his boot. “I saw a dead man walking.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Carter. “You saw a live man walking, and then you made him a dead man. It becomes even more imperative we find the technology for the Federate. You need to get to that buyer and acquire the asset. To use your word, this is powerful ‘stuff.’”

  Mason chewed the inside of his lip, looking around at the bodies. Some were still burning. “They looked dead. They were attacking.”

  “Wait. I’ll show you.” Carter rewound the tactical overlay to the time Mason opened fire. “See?”

  “Ah, Christ,” said Mason. “I shot a bunch of vagrants, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah,” said Carter. “But that’s not the interesting bit.”

  Mason walked amongst the remains of the bodies. “What did Specialist Smith get kicked out of the Marines for?”

  “Discharged.”

  “What?”

  “They call it ‘discharged,’ Mason.”

  Mason sighed. “Okay. Discharged.”