“Sure,” Dolph said. “No one’s here, anyway.” He lifted his phone and turned it to point down 27th Street. It was a dead end, rare in Shiftertown. A goliath flytrap half the size of a city block—the only one left in Mag-Ingat, and a major tourist attraction—towered over the houses, hundreds of frilled purple mouths gaping among its foliage. The flytrap blocked off the Strip end of 27th, so the only entrance was on Creek, where Dolph and Robbie were sitting. It did look deserted.
Robbie broke in, leaning across Dolph. “We caught one of them.”
“You did?”
“Kelly’s ex. She was on her way to pick up some stuff from their house,” Dolph said. “Robbie’s peeved that I wouldn’t let the wolves smack her around.”
“She said they aren’t coming back,” Robbie blurted.
“What? Ever?”
“That’s what she said.”
“And there you have it, the secret master plan, straight from the disgruntled ex-wife of a second-tier bear,” Dolph said. “They’re going home; so that’s what they needed half a million GCs for. I’m gonna write to Tom and tell him to put them to work in the Shinakita fisheries. Pay ‘em in by-catch.” The corner of his mouth quirked viciously.
I didn’t think Dolph believed his own theory, but it sounded halfway plausible to me. Shifters do “go home,” when everything else seems futile. The 500 KGCs the bears had stolen from me would buy half a dozen tickets to San Damiano.
It would almost be worth the half a mil to get rid of them.
Of course, whether they’d like it when they got there was another story. “Put ‘em on an icebreaker in the Cascadera Straits,” I said. “Teach ‘em what real work feels like.”
At that moment, a uniformed motorcycle cop cruised along the street, straddling one of those hybrid bikes that look like torpedoes on wheels. Close behind him came an armored PdL Corrections prisoner transport van with no windows. The van splashed through the puddle in front of the burger joint, displacing a wave onto the strip of mud that served as a sidewalk, and my feet. The Gillies outside the restaurant were still swearing at the receding van when another motorcycle zoomed past and splashed us again.
“Figure that’s Parsec and companions,” I said. holding my phone up so Dolph could see. It gave me a queer shiver to think that my old arch-enemy was inside that van, in cuffs, on his way from one cell to another.
Nunak’s tag started to move.
“Hold up. He’s following them.” I strode towards my truck. “That’s why he was sitting here—he was just waiting for the prison convoy to go past …”
I barely got inside my truck before Nunak’s car, a beat-up sedan, passed. I glimpsed the pudgy albino man behind the wheel, working on a computer instead of driving. To my surprise, he had a passenger. It was a woman, but I didn’t get a clear look at her face.
I let them get out of sight and then started the truck.
36
I started to feel sick about half an hour out of Buonaville. The feeling was so unfamiliar that I couldn’t identify it at first. Then I did. Good old-fashioned nausea.
I couldn’t believe it. I was a Shifter, with a digestive system of steel. I never puked in zero-gravity. I had eaten out on a hundred Fringeworlds without an issue. The last time I threw up after drinking too much, I was in my teens.
Goddamn Gillies. Goddamn fishburger. I knew that place was filthy. There had been fish guts on the same work surface where they were preparing the burgers.
I pushed the nausea away as best I could, and scowled through the windshield at the road ahead of me. The sun had begun its slide into the west, and stabbed into the truck cab. The police convoy was stuck behind a refrigerator van. Nunak hung back behind them.
My stomach knotted. Maybe it would be a good idea to stop on the shoulder and let the fishburger come back up. Get it out of my system.
For distraction, I called Martin. Ol’ snake had gone to ground after the customs inspectors tore up our freight terminal. He had video disabled, but I could hear voices in the background. Martin had friends he never introduced to us. They were all snakes, so I didn’t mind if I never met them. I told him what I was doing.
“Sounds like he’s up to something,” Martin said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I had worked that out, believe it or not.”
Martin let out a lazy chuckle. I could hear other snakes laughing, too. The sound made my skin crawl.
The truck breasted a low hill. The highway stretched out ahead, an endless gray ribbon narrowing between solid walls of jungle. Nunak had dropped back further behind the convoy. Two long-haul trucks were coming the other way.
I noticed the lead truck speeding up, opening a gap between itself and the other one, as it passed the convoy.
With a sudden screech of brakes, like well-drilled platoons wheeling, both of the articulated behemoths swung across the highway, blocking the road in front of the police convoy and behind it … boxing it in.
I instinctively stepped on the brake. “Fuck,” I yelled into the phone. “It’s a trap. They’ve stopped the convoy.”
The refrigerator van in front of the police vehicles smashed into the rig lying across its path. Its nose crumpled. It slewed sideways, hit the rig again, and rebounded onto its side.
The first motorcycle cop lifted off, riding his bike into the air. These hybrid bikes double as flying machines. Hugging the torpedo-shaped fuselage, the cop skimmed across the top of the stalled rig—and fell off. I thought he must have clipped the truck’s roof. Then I heard the shot.
“They shot a cop,” I gasped. I was coasting down the hill, losing my view. The second motorcycle cop took off, rising as high and fast as he could. All that meant was he had further to fall. “They shot both the cops!”
“That means they’ll shoot anyone,” Martin said. “Get out of there!”
My lips skinned back from my teeth. “They’re blocking the whole road,” I said. “And I’d rather die than go back to Buonaville.”
I ran the truck up on the shoulder and jumped out, taking my phone and my .22.
Sunlight flowed around me like golden syrup, thick and sweet, scented by the flowering weeds that choked the shoulder. About one klick ahead, the other long-haul rig blocked the road. It had buried its nose in the jungle. The logo on its side said TRIDENT OVERLAND.
So I’d been right. Nunak had bought the company … to keep it under Parsec’s control. And now I knew what he’d been doing at the Trident Overland depot this morning.
Jailbreaking the trucks. Killing the AIs. Preparing them for their final mission.
As I jogged towards the roadblock, more shots cracked out. I recognized the rat-tat-tat of a police issue machine pistol, and the roar of a shotgun. I instinctively flinched towards the strimmed wall of the jungle. Silence returned. Alternately jogging and walking, I moved closer to the roadblock.
Nunak’s car had stopped behind the nearer Trident Overland rig. While I was still half a klick away, he and his passenger got out, wearing backpacks, and crawled into the jungle.
You’d have to crawl. Only at ground level was there enough room between the stems and trunks for a human body to fit through. I knew it would open up deeper in, but I also didn’t want to take the time to bushwhack through the Tunjle. My phone told me that one minute and forty seconds had passed since the cops got shot down. Out here in the middle of nowhere, response times would be relatively slow. But it still couldn’t be more than ten minutes before retribution arrived.
The Fleet defends Ponce de Leon in orbit, but the police force owns the atmosphere. I had seen the PdL PD’s subsonic tilt-rotor aircraft in action before. They also had crowd control drones which could project non-lethal force from the air. I’d seen some of those loitering over Creek Avenue this morning. Add in ordinary, heavily armed cop cars to the mix, and it wouldn’t be long before this turned into a very bad day for the bears.
I reached the roadblock. Urgent shouts came from the other side of the Trident Overland be
hemoth. I aimed my .22 up into the cab of the big rig, saw no one. I used the hubcap as a ladder to clamber onto the hood, which was half buried in the jungle.
Am incongruous reek of fish rekindled my nausea. The refrigerator van had scattered its contents across the road when it crashed. People were slipping on frozen, rapidly melting milkfish, tilapia, and crabs. Crushed scales glittered around the prisoner transport van.
Both the motorcycle cops lay dead on the asphalt. So did one Shifter, a fallen mountain of muscle. I would never get my revenge on Skylights.
The Gillie driver of the refrigerator van drooped head and shoulders out the window of his vehicle, also dead.
I counted eight bears at the back of the minibus, using a cutting torch on the rear doors. Metal smoked under the acetylene-powered flame.
Beyond all that, a hulking, shirtless man stood on top of the other Trident Overland rig, scanning the road in both directions. It was Larry Kodiak. He had a machine-gun. He saw me and shouted.
A second later, half a dozen guns pointed at me.
I stayed put for a second, thinking through my options. But I didn’t really have any. I could either get involved, or become a casualty.
“You need a lookout on the Buonaville side,” I said, sliding down the side of the hood. “Nunak booked it into the woods.”
Gary Kodiak strode up to me, carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun. The scars I had left on his face twisted his smile into a sneer. “The fuck you doing here?”
“Give me my money and I’m gone.”
“Ain’t got your goddamn money.” At least he didn’t pretend not to know anything about it. “But I got something else for you.” He raised the shotgun and racked the slide with that terrifying ch-chunk! sound.
I looked past the double barrels at him. “Y’all got about six minutes to live, so why are you wasting them on me?”
Something gave way in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to kill the cops,” he said.
Suzie Shivers marched up to us. She was two hundred pounds of sex appeal shrinkwrapped in camouflage, with a taste for fast food and violence. “Can’t get through the fucking armor plating,” she said. “Who’s this mope?”
“Mike Starrunner,” I said, with my best friendly smile. “Can I try?”
They had been attempting to cut through the back door of the minibus. The torch hadn’t burned but half an inch into the steel plating. It would work, but it would take a couple of hours, which they didn’t have.
“Thermite the hinges,” I suggested.
“We don’t got thermite,” Suzie said.
“I figured. Well, there’s another way.”
“Bash the doors open with your ugly fucking head?” Gary K said.
I gave him a mild look, and held out my hand for his shotgun. “Can I use that?”
He snarled and held it away from me.
“Jesus,” I said. “There’s eight of you and one of me. If I wanted you dead, I would have just sat in my truck and waited for the riot squad to arrive.”
A low, almost imperceptible thrumming thickened the air.
“That’s them,” Suzie said. “Give him the gun, Gary. If it don’t work, well, it was him that pulled the trigger and not us.”
Gary gave me the gun. I always knew Suzie wore the pants in that relationship.
“Stand back.” I snugged the butt of the shotgun into my shoulder and shot the lock of the rear door. The noise echoed up and down the highway and over the treetops. I hadn’t used a shotgun in forever, but I liked the sheer power of the 12-gauge. The lock was solidly built. I had to reload, move closer, and give it another blast before the pellets mangled the lock enough that Gary could pry it open.
Through the ringing in my ears, I could no longer hear the approaching aircraft. I glanced up. Only sky.
The door of the van swung open, and out lumbered a 250-pound grizzly bear.
Blood lathered his muzzle.
Glancing into the gloom of the bus, I saw two uniformed guards lying in the aisle between the seats, in pools of blood smeared and tracked by the bear’s massive pads.
A pair of handcuffs lay on the floor near a torn and discarded prison uniform.
“Minute they were distracted, I Shifted right out of those cuffs,” Parsec said. “Bit their fucking throats out. If y’all took much longer to get this shit open, I would’ve had to eat them to avoid dying of starvation, and I don’t like eating human beings. They got no taste.”
His gaze fell on me.
“On the other hand, I could always make an exception.”
He rolled towards me, little piggy eyes blazing.
I held my ground. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be stuck in there.”
“If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Larry Kodiak, on top of the Trident Overland rig, yelled and pointed. We all pivoted to search the southern sky. Two white spots separated themselves from the puffy afternoon clouds. Their thrumming sounded like the insects up at Alec’s place, a vibration that seemed to be coming from the air itself, soft and hot.
“Well, my my,” I said softly. “Guess that’s your flight to San Damiano.”
Parsec speared me with a look of burning dislike. “San Damiaaaano?” He mocked my accent. “You can keep that shithole. Ponce de Leon is where I was born. It’s my homeworld.” He raised his voice. “This is our homeworld, and this is where we’re staying.”
Parsec swung to face Gary K. He was in bear form, and he had only just escaped from the worst prison on the planet, but he was fully in command of his troops.
“You prepped the delaying measures?”
“Nunak says it’s all set.”
“I sure hope that little squirt knows what he’s doing.” Parsec loped towards the jungle on the inland side of the road. All the bears followed him, grabbing up their tools and packs. I knew each one of them by name: the Kodiak twins, Suzie, Hokkaido a.k.a. George Kumamoto, Steve Kelly, Caspar Silverback, Whitey a.k.a. Samuel Medvedovsky, and the Montagna girls, Liz and Veronica. The entire inner circle. Kelly and Whitey had machetes, with which they swung at the strimmed wall of green, cutting a hole in it for the other bears to squeeze through. The vague thought floated through my mind that they were gonna have a hard time bushwhacking while carrying all that luggage. I stayed where I was for a minute, watching the riot birds approach. Then I followed the bears.
They hadn’t got far yet. Although the jungle was so thick I couldn’t see an arm’s length ahead of my face, their macheted trail was easy to follow, and they were making enough noise for an army. I delicately stepped over grabber fungi that had been trodden in by ursine size sixteens, and ducked under the severed ends of strangler vines oozing sticky sap. Parsec’s voice called down to me from overhead.
“Starrunner.”
His little angry eyes peered down through the foliage of a weatherstopper tree. I half smiled to myself, remembered how he had chased me up a tree outside Dr. Zeb’s clinic in August. I started to climb. Fortunately, weatherstoppers have branches that stick out as regularly as the spokes of a spiral staircase.
Ahead of me, Parsec climbed higher, knocking leaf dust and insects down into my face. I caught up with him near the top of the tree.
Here, while remaining concealed by the canopy of the giant weatherstopper, we could see across the lower treetops to the road.
The first riot bird descended towards the roadblock, its rotors tilted upwards into helicopter configuration. My gaze rested on the PdL PD logo on its side—the same eagle and stars that was on Jose-Maria d’Alencon’s badge, and over the door of the Shoreside police precinct, and on my own Ponce de Leon landing license.
Traffic had backed up by now on either side of the roadblock. Several self-driving trucks nosed moronically at the Trident Overland rigs, trying to find a way around them. Cars with human drivers were U-turning to get away as the first riot bird looked for space to land. The second bird was rapidly descending.
“Wait fo
r it,” Parsec said, “wait for it … if that fucker Nunak fucked up, I’ll flay him …”
One of the Trident Overland rigs exploded.
It lifted several feet off the ground. Fire burst from under its hood and boiled out of its windows.
Both riot birds fell out of the air.
One of them fell from an altitude of fifty meters, and landed on the burning Trident Overland truck.
The other fell … considerably further … and landed on the traffic.
37
Both riot birds exploded with the raging, hissing fury of jet fuel finding its way to electrical lines. The impacts shook our tree like a double earthquake. I clung to my branch, cursing in shock.
Each of those birds carried a crew of six. Each of those officers had family. As the noise of secondary explosions settled down, I screamed at Parsec, calling him a fucking murderer and worse.
“Zip it, Starrunner. They had it coming. You know what I went through in that jailhouse? You know what it’s like being a Shifter in jail? They put broken glass in my breakfast. I had to watch my back even when I was asleep. I got scars I didn’t have before, inside and out.”
“At least you’re alive.”
“You say that like you’re joking. But I tell you this in all truth: I wouldn’t have lasted another month in that place.”
“The bright side is you won’t have to go back,” I said. “When they catch you, it’ll be the needle.”
“You mean if.”
I unglued my eyes from the horror of the burning aircraft and cars. Raised them to the horizon. “Wanna hedge your bets?”
More choppers were coming. I counted three, and then I turned in the direction of Buonaville and saw another one.
“Those are just traffic cops,” Parsec said. “Except for the one from the jail. That’ll be the one they use to hunt for escaped prisoners. I ain’t too worried. Their search and destroy functionality is fifty years out of date, ‘cause no one ever has escaped from that hellhole they have the nerve to call a humane penitentiary facility. Until me.”
Dirty Job Page 22