The stories were wrong; they didn’t have nightvision. They saw with the ripples, like bats in the dark.
Somehow, that was so much worse.
They passed by the occasional occupied shanty or houseboat, the objectively dim lights cutting what seemed like blindingly sharp stencils of radiance onto the splintering docks, but Red’s captors always avoided them, skirting the light rather than pursuing it. Though it became apparent that they were generally approaching some sort of large, diffuse light source, because the man shuffling immediately to Red’s left was slowly beginning to resolve. At first, he was just an amorphous something – a black blob against a sea of black — but then Red started to discern the outline of limbs. Soon, there were textures – little more than a pattern of lighter and darker splotches at first – but soon followed by finer details. Eventually the man strode beside Red in perfect clarity: He was built eerily like Red himself — average height, a thin frame, wider at the shoulder and narrower at the hip. He seemed malnourished somehow. Hungry. But something told Red the man did not want not for food. There were large bags beneath both eyes, and his skin was matte and thin. But where Red’s eyes were a dull, puddle-brown, the man’s were so light grey as to be nearly transparent. It was surely a trick of the wan, intermittent light, but Red thought he saw things whirring there, in the irises-Red struck something sharply with his shin, and swore. He glanced down and instantly felt foolish for it, forgetting that he could not see his own feet for the complete and utter darkness.
Complete and utter darkness.
The only thing slowly resolving into light was the man opposite him. Red looked over slowly, trying not to draw the man’s attention. But the man must have seen him, because he turned simultaneously, like a mirror image, and smiled. Then he reached up with his hands — both encased in thin, metallic gloves up to the elbows, ribbed with a network of tiny spikes, terminals and connectors — and slashed Red across the face.
Red cried out and bent double. Someone probed his prone form with a toe. Red did not move. A voice said ‘hold,’ and the unseen captors all stopped as one. Somebody dragged Red to his feet, and somebody else shined a bright little cluster of yellow LEDs in his face.
“He bleedin’. Looks deep.”
“The fuck he do that? This Ancient Oswald’s place, ain’t it? Jack shit here to cut your face up on. Lights. Short burst.”
A dozen identical yellow clusters flicked on in the darkness, swooped about in a tight little circle, and snapped off. The whole thing took less than a second.
“Yeh. There’s nothin’.”
“What’d you do?”
“I don’t know,” Red answered, and put a hand to his face. It came away wet. “I’ve been seeing things. Side effect of a Beta, maybe? Hell, it could be a delayed reaction from any number of hallucinogens. Most of my Rx mixes are pirated – maybe somebody spiked a ‘feed. Could be anything.”
“Anything? The fuck you mean anything?”
“He saying a drug just slashed his face open.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” he answered anyway, “I uh…I guess I am.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Though objectively he knew it to be impossible, Byron could, nonetheless, smell the man’s face burning off. It was in his body language, Byron decided. The frantic scrabbling at the face and panicked kicking of the feet put Byron in mind of a scalding wound. It was perfectly rational, as the closest analogue Byron had for the immediacy and intensity of the man’s apparent pain was a nasty burn, and so his mind simply filled in the blanks: Supplying the acrid stink of charring meat and the sizzle of fat on bone - though of course, in reality, there was no such thing. Perhaps the oily iron scent that some strains of fast-acting nanobot emitted could be detected, but the skin itself was generating no reek of its own, surely.
The screaming fellow was the first to dismount one of the flat, featureless boats and mount the gently rocking deck of the floating drug laboratory. QC had spun up at him from her crouch behind the barrier wall and caught him full-face with a thick, wet mouthful of disassemblers. The heavyset man with the flashing cosmetic mandibles had merely clutched at the bridge of his nose, at first, more confused than hurt. But then a look of fluctuating disbelief overtook him, and soon he was executing a spastic jig across the damp plastic planks of the drug lab. After a few moments of nervous misfires, the man’s system shut down entirely, and he laid himself out flat, absently kicking his heels against the diamond-scratched runners.
The little blonde girl caught the next boarder in mid-air with a low, hard kick, just as he was leaping from his skiff onto the lip of the barge. He crumpled silently and sunk into the water below with hardly a splash. Byron briefly considered fighting – truly, he did; he’d fared quite well against those assailants out on the piers, after all — but that bravado had come to him spontaneously, overriding any higher functions. He hadn’t had time to think, then, and that instinctual response was the key to his successful attack. Now, however, he’d had whole minutes to contemplate the danger, while Little Deng’s security forces organized into two-man parties, mounted their perfectly flat silver planks, and silently pulsed across the water from the manse. It was contemplation that paralyzed Byron, and it was now doing so with gusto.
He felt his heartbeat thrum behind his eyes. His lungs struggled to draw in thin, anxious pulls of air. No, he could not fight. Instead, Byron undertook the most helpful action that sprung to mind: He handed QC a short length of pipe, clapped her soundly on the back, and then hid behind a barrel.
Beyond the first wave, Byron could only hear the resulting melee, as he was not willing to risk ducking his head out for fear of being seen.
The sounds:
A low, sad keen. Presumably the man with the spittoon for a face.
Splashing. The fellow QC had sent into the water?
Swearing. Byron had once read that martial artists have something they call a Kiai – a sound they scream upon striking that gives release to the force they’ve built up inside. QC’s Kiai seemed to be “motherfucker.”
A dull pop. It did not echo.
Muffled barking. The men, hollering orders in a language he could not understand.
And silence.
A large, heavy hand clasped Byron’s shoulder and wrenched him up. Instinctually, he began talking:
“Hullo, gentlemen!” He exclaimed with mock relief. “I seem to be a bit lost here! Quite fortunate you came along, actually. You see, I found myself rather low indeed on my daily chemical sustenance this morn, and thought to visit my stalwart friend and erstwhile distributor, Mr. Little Deng, in hopes of resuming our formerly beneficial relationship. I suppose I’ve taken a wrong turn, though, haven’t I? Ho ho! I jest, I jest. Regardless, if you could now simply point me in his general direction, my over-zealous young companion,” he gestured at QC’s prone form, wrapped in a thin, clinging film, like forgotten leftovers, “and I would be in your respective debts.”
“Talks like a faggot,” said one man, whom Byron saw, with sinking heart, was covered with a familiar set of brutal media tattoos.
“That was uncalled for!” Byron reprimanded, and took a deep breath in preparation for another diatribe.
A gargantuan, vice-like paw clasped over his mouth from behind.
“Not anymore he don’t,” another voice added.
How very Spartan, Byron thought.
The men bound his hands to his feet and shoved rags down his throat. It took pathetically few seconds to immobilize him. With a soft grunt, Byron was hefted bodily from the sky blue plastic planks of the laboratory, and found himself rocking gently beneath one hulking grey arm like a bag of nervous, pasty groceries. The other fellow slipped a long, vicious hook out of his belt and bent to QC. Byron’s stomach clenched and his chest hammered, but the man merely secured it into an empty space of film to better drag the unconscious girl behind him. They were both tossed roughly into a planate skiff, and after a few unnaturally still
moments – something in the plank apparently cancelling out the natural momentum of the water — were dragged out again and thrown onto the docks behind Little Deng’s palatial houseboat.
“Get the boss,” one captor told the other, and Byron heard footsteps begin to depart. “He might wanna know why some uppity junkie and his pet bitch been throwing his name about.”
Byron waffled between relief and heightened terror: His central fear thus far had been being brutally murdered before getting to Little Deng. But now he found that he was less than enthusiastic for their meeting, after being seized in the man’s drug lab and attacking his employees. Byron had heard the stories about Deng, of course: That he deployed industrial scourer-bots – a particularly virile strain of nano-machine designed back at the turn of the century to strip old steel from the hulls of ancient, defunct freight ships – against potential thieves. And that he fermented the puddles that the offending parties left behind in ornate bottles behind his bar, drinking from a new one every night. But those were stories; Byron had always found the man himself to be personable enough. But then, Byron had always been in the act of paying him vast amounts of money for high-grade, unsanctioned Presence. That fact alone might have tempered the man’s otherwise irascible persona.
There was a soft, crystalline tinkling. A chandelier swaying gently in a spring breeze from an open window. Little Deng was here.
Byron was face down, the bulk of his weight on his own face. His gaze was immobile. He stared placidly at an empty patch of floor until two gnarled, bare feet shuffled into view.
“Who’s this we got here? This the little prince?” Deng asked, his voice quiet and skeptical.
“Salutations, Monsieur Deng,” Byron offered cordially.
Somebody was grabbing at him, hauling him up to his knees. The gnarled feet led upward into a pair of pale, smooth legs, followed by baggy cargo shorts, and then a ratty purple blouse cut from a constantly shimmering and shifting material, left open to a bare, sunken chest. Eventually Byron found himself staring Little Deng full in the face: He was smaller than Byron, with broad, flat, light-skinned features. A corona of long, chunky locks of hair wrapped around his head into a sort of turban. Into each lock, he had braided a motley of colored glass. The man tinkled like a champagne toast with the slightest movement.
“Mussyour Deng,” he laughed, “ain’t that some shit?”
Deng fancied himself some sort of tribal shaman, Byron knew, but he’d apparently drawn all of his reference points from the confused pseudo-history of the public access databases. Anybody could edit them, on a whim and without credential. The result was often a mish-mash of exaggerations, fallacies and juvenile pranks. It was not uncommon for the historical vid-feeds to be ripped and re-uploaded with altered audio; it was uncommon for anybody to care enough to fix it. Little Deng may have indeed been the merciless reincarnation of a Sudanese Rain God, but he spoke like a thuggish, 20th century caricature. In the perpetual shadow of the Four Posts, all of the Reservoir dwellers’ skin inevitably faded to a sickly grayish hue, but Deng would have been pale anywhere. Here, living in perpetual twilight, he was translucent. So white that his veins stood out in bright green by contrast, like circuitboards beneath the skin.
“You doin’ us a favor, comin’ down here, huh? This a social call?”
“I’m afraid n-” Byron began to speak, but Deng arced a backhand up so casually Byron didn’t even think to flinch. He found himself on the floor again, staring at those calloused, dirty feet.
“Nah, that ain’t it. This here’s business, right? You just got confused is all. You thought my shit was self-serve, right? You’d just swing on by – no need to bother me so late at night – and pick up some of my merchandise, leave the money on the counter, and be on your way. Am I right, or am I right, or am I right?”
“It’s not like that!” Byron protested, and a foot came up sharply, clipping him in the nose. Not hard enough to break the cartilage, but the jagged nails drew blood anyway. It spilled in a thin stream to the deck beneath him, and Byron quieted, staring blankly into the puddle.
“Ok, shit. That was harsh,” Little Deng seemed to lapse into momentary panic. He took a few quick, deep breaths, and held his hands out in placation. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “I’m sorry. That shit was uncalled for. You gotta know you’re welcome here – hell, we had the red carpet laid out! This party, man, this shit’s for you! But you come at me like this, little prince? You fuckin’ break into my home – my lab?!”
As he awaited a response, Little Deng paced nervously across the dock; the sound of distant glass breaking followed with him.
“P-party? I’m afraid I don’t follow. Are you being facetious, sir? I realize we did not follow the protocol for meeting, but I assure you, we only wished to speak with you! I pleaded with your man outside,” this warranted a sharp guffaw from somewhere behind Byron, “and he regretfully informed us of your unavailability. The urgency of our claims did nothing to sway him, or perhaps we were remiss in impressing upon him the direness of the matter at hand. Please be assured, Monsieur Deng, that we would never deign to trespass if it were not of the utmost import. And we would never stoop so low as thievery, regardless of circumstance. Besides, have you ever known me to lack for funds?”
Fear had always made Byron loquacious. It was a habit that did him more harm than good, as those it did not confuse, it inevitably infuriated. But it seemed to be affecting Little Deng now: He stared disbelievingly at somebody behind Byron.
“That was a whole lotta words just to say ‘I’m sorry I’m such a faggot’” said a brute in the middle distance. Another laughed.
“He telling the truth?” Deng seemed to be addressing the man who spoke.
“Yeah, but boss he didn’t look like what you sai-” Deng made a quick motion with his hand, and the brute’s voice choked off too abruptly. There was something insidiously wet to that last syllable that told Byron the silencing had been violent in nature.
Now he heard only the clamoring of glass and the remote ebbing of water.
“Monsieur, please!” Byron fought back a rising surge of adrenal tears, “we meant no ill-will!”
“Settle down, buddy. Your daddy being who he is, that buys you an explanation. But some punk disrespects me, I don’t give a shit about his family, you understand?”
“No,” Byron answered honestly. His father? What did his father have to do with anything? Byron always took the utmost pains to conceal his identity. Privacy came easily with enough credits, and that was one thing Byron could provide.
“Good. I like that answer. That shit’s called brevity,” Deng Laughed, “that shit’s the soul of wit.”
Polonius? Those were his father’s words, the incessant, arrogant quotes…
“Boss, you popular today.”
Deng spun about with a sound like a cocktail party falling down a flight of stairs. Deng’s body was obscuring the totality of Byron’s view, but he could tell that a group of visitors now stood uncertainly in the far doorway, surrounded by a posse of grey men in full battle regalia.
“About fuckin’ time!” Deng’s voice lifted joyously.
He shuffled toward the newcomers, his clawed toenails clacking loudly against the dock, and stepped out of Byron’s line of sight. As he did so, Byron met eyes first with a striking, if slightly mannish, dark-skinned, one-legged woman, followed by a slight, befreckled, redheaded fellow in an antique green blazer, complete with canary-yellow necktie, and finally with a haggard, pallid, and bleeding Red.
Red’s face went blank with disbelief.
“What the f-” he mouthed silently to Byron, but then Deng was embracing him tightly, spinning him around, and laughing uproariously.
Chapter Twenty-Six
James was doing his best to go unnoticed. It wasn’t hard work: Keep your mouth shut, stand somewhere dark, and don’t make eye contact. Easier for him than some — he was never much of a presence to begin with: Slight of frame, short to middli
ng height, a crop of chaotic red hair, and great, fleshy bags slung perpetually beneath each eye. Most people assumed he was some kind of socially stunted software engineer.
He kept himself purposefully unkempt, just shy of noticeably disgusting. This served to cultivate a befuddled, uncertain aura, like a scatter-brained professor.
His featureless grey trousers and Robin’s Egg Blue button-down shirt were carefully neutral, of no particular style, cost, or time period. This served to emphasize his anonymity.
His necktie was brilliant yellow, and he kept it clean, crisp, and impeccably tied. This served to look bloody sharp.
A man’s got to have his pride.
James’ only custom piece of kit was the archaic green-and-black-checkered sportcoat, carefully worried, stained and frayed to emulate disuse. There was nothing special about the jacket itself; it was plain cloth of some defunct stock. Polyester, maybe? He’d heard the name before, but couldn’t say for sure. It was from before the public ‘feeds came online, that was for certain – there was no nano-fiber reinforcement, no low emission energy field to repel bots, not even an anti-bacterial nanosilver lining. The only tech in James’ jacket, he’d had to install himself, and it wasn’t exactly a high-end job: Just micrometer thick netting laced between the lining and the outer shell, coated in inert plastic. With the twist of a cufflink, the coating would lose its molecular stability, freeing up the razor-wire. The slightest movement would then send the net slicing through the fabric of the jacket, as well as any nearby flesh (preferably not his own). Well, that was how it worked in theory, anyway. By its very nature, it was a one-shot use, and testing its functionality would shred his sportcoat into a pile of perfectly symmetrical quarter inch fabric squares.
Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity Page 18