Nathan exited The Belt alongside the Fourth Precinct building, and heard a sharp whistle as a black and white police cruiser hummed across the street to his side, its gull–wing doors open for him to climb aboard.
‘You’re kidding me?’ Nathan sighed as he looked inside. ‘You’re driving again?’
‘You snooze you lose, buster!’
Nathan climbed in alongside traffic officer Betty “Buzz” Luther as the cruiser’s doors closed either side of them and Betty guided the vehicle up smoothly into the flow of aerial traffic cruising through the station’s skies.
‘You’re doing this to annoy me,’ Nathan complained.
‘I’m doing it to help you,’ Betty replied with a bright smile. ‘You can’t just become a detective overnight and not know your city. Lieutenant Foxx put you here for a reason, so suck it up and get to work.’
Betty was a gray–haired woman of perhaps fifty or so years, although it was tough for Nathan to tell for sure because people all looked so young. Betty may well have been seventy years old or more, and her sedate lack of ostentation at the cruiser’s controls suggested that she had been on the force for many decades, as did her reputation for somewhat reckless flying. Keen eyes scanned the traffic around them, and despite her experience Betty proudly wore the blues of the traffic police.
‘You could have made captain by now,’ Nathan pointed out as they levelled out amid the traffic streams headed for Phoenix Heights.
‘I could’ve made Director General by now,’ Betty replied calmly. ‘But I don’t much like offices.’
‘Nor me,’ Nathan replied, tugging at the uncomfortable collar of his uniform. ‘Don’t much like uniforms either.’
‘But you sure do like complaining,’ Betty observed. ‘What’s the name of that block over there?’
Betty nodded to an ugly high–rise jutting up out of the shadowy confines of Phoenix Heights a thousand feet below them.
‘Byron Tower,’ he replied.
‘And that one?’
‘Falls Incorporated,’ he replied, ‘headquarters of the Falls Mining Company.’
‘Very good,’ Betty chortled with a motherly pat on his forearm. ‘What’s our speed, altitude and time to the North Quarter?’
Nathan glanced at the instrument display that suddenly appeared before him, an optical projection that created a three dimensional map of the city around them now tagged with names for all buildings and even, if they required it, all citizens below.
‘Seventy knots, three hundred fifteen meters, four minutes and twelve seconds.’
‘Point the location out to me.’
Nathan looked up out of the cruiser’s clear canopy and pointed up toward the distant side of the station’s sweeping surface, where the tops of high–rises were visible catching the light of the sun through the station’s ray–shielding girders.
‘Excellent.’
Betty said nothing more as they cruised through a wispy bank of cloud, the sunlight streaming through the vapor in fingers of gold light tinged with rainbow hues as the moisture separated the sun’s spectrum. The city’s dehumidifiers had long since become overwhelmed by the volume of population now living inside New Washington, creating novel weather systems above the city that included rainfall literally created by moisture from citizen’s sweat and respiration. All of the orbital stations suffered from the same consequential ecosystem issues, despite the efforts of their respective governors in raising the capital needed to repair and improve the systems.
‘How long do you think Lieutenant Foxx is gonna keep me on traffic duty?’ Nathan asked.
‘As long as it takes.’
‘And how long is that?’
Betty sighed. ‘As long as I decide it takes.’
Nathan leaned back in his seat. He was about to ask another question when the cruiser’s communicators crackled.
‘Robbery in progress, Constitution and Fourth, ten–thirteen – repeat, ten–thirteen. All available units deploy immediately!’
Nathan instinctively hit the sirens and lights as Betty accelerated and pulled up above the traffic streams.
‘What’s a ten–thirteen, Nathan?’ she asked him, her tones clipped now.
Nathan needed no reminding, the code the same as when he had been a Denver police detective some four hundred years previously.
‘Shots fired,’ he replied as he checked his sidearm.
***
III
Betty guided the cruiser down through the streams of aerial traffic, their flashing hazard lights glowing as they descended through a thin layer of mist. Nathan glimpsed the lights flickering in the passing windows of high–rise buildings built long before the invention of hard–light, the glass old and stained with the accumulated grime of decades.
‘C’mon, get outta my damned way!’
Betty gestured for a slow vehicle to shift aside as she jerked the cruiser to the right and banked steeply over. Nathan grabbed the side rest for support as the cruiser shot through a narrow gap between the slow vehicle and the solid walls of a tower block as he recalled why Betty had gained the nickname “Buzz”. Windows flashed by, shocked faces leaping back as the cruiser rocketed past.
‘Officer down and in distress!’ barked a voice on the communicator.
‘Officers Luther and Ironside, ETA twenty seconds!’ Nathan replied as he drew his service pistol in preparation.
Alongside the city’s northern beltway was a series of high–rise projects that had long since been the blight of New Washington, a haven for the criminal low life packed inside North Four. The drug trade, which prospered despite the complexities of living in such a city, had produced a new underbelly that the police department had long fought to eradicate, but those down in the planet–side capital of New York City seemed to care little for their brethren in New Washington. With crime often concentrated around the Four Corners, and with illegal bandwidth jammers creating entire blocks where police communicators became ineffective, the projects were a dangerous location for any police officer to find themselves whether under fire or not.
‘Any idea on the number of shooters?’ Betty asked the despatcher.
‘Negative!’ came the tense reply. ‘Multiple witnesses though, a citizen called it in.’
‘No radio coverage,’ Nathan said as Betty descended to street level. ‘We’re on our own.’
‘Stay close,’ Betty advised as the cruiser settled down onto a street already filled with citizens scattering away from a disturbance ahead. ‘Keep line of sight, understood?’
‘You got it,’ Nathan said as the cruiser’s gull wings opened and he vaulted from the seat.
For the first time Betty showed her true age as Nathan sprinted away from the cruiser, dodging like a gazelle through the fleeing crowds as Betty struggled to keep pace behind him. Nathan heard a crackle of gunfire somewhere up ahead, coming from a tower block on the corner of Constitution. Screams echoed across the streets and he saw an individual sprint across the street at a speed no normal human could achieve.
‘They’re enhanced!’ he yelled over his shoulder to Betty as they ran.
A vibrant black–market trade in biomechanical surgery thrived within the Four Corners, providing performance enhancing prosthetics. Most were modified from those used by hospitals to replace limbs lost in accidents, where the patient’s own tissues were used to regrow the limbs: instead of replacing the natural limb, the black–market version would be enhanced by molecular titanium reinforcements, a nanofiber mesh woven into the fabric of human skin that gave increased durability and rendered the wearer virtually impervious to pain. Outlawed almost a century before except for those protected by the veil of “human rights” laws that enshrined the citizen’s right to self–enhancement if born deformed or deficient in any way, criminals made full use of the enhancements along with a multitude of other modifications.
A moment later Nathan spotted the cop lying in the street, one hand still grasping a pistol and the other clasped ov
er a wound in his chest, wispy tendrils of blue smoke spiralling up from his smoldering uniform where the plasma round hit him.
‘Stay with the officer!’ Nathan yelled behind him to Betty, the older officer having fallen further behind. ‘I’ll track down the shooter!’
‘Keep line of sight!’ Betty shouted breathlessly.
Nathan barely heard her as he dashed across the street in pursuit of the felon who had vanished into a building in the block opposite, pedestrians scattering away from the pistol he was brandishing. Nathan hit the side street at a sprint and rushed up to the door which was still swinging from side to side where the perp’ had crashed through it. Faded paintwork above the door for a convenience store stained the otherwise unadorned walls.
Nathan skittered to a halt and then peeked around the corner of the jam into the gloom within. Moving beams of sunlight pierced the darkness like drifting strobes as the station rotated slowly in space, streaming through the only gaps of glass not smeared with grime. Nathan eased inside and listened intently as he crouched down and hugged the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.
The sounds of the street outside were muted by the interior of the building, which was cooler than the city streets. Nathan could hear a rhythmic dripping of water, condensation and damp a problem in buildings where the airflow generated by gigantic low–level fans had long ago ceased. Debris littered the floor as Nathan crouched down and listened, forcing himself not to switch on his night–vision lens to aid his search: the devices were excellent but easily foiled by a wily opponent with a flash light.
Nathan heard a flutter of light footsteps from across the building, ascending fast, and he broke cover and sprinted across the interior of the ground floor. Once filled with ranks of shelves, their markings on the tiled floor clearly visible even in the low light, the ground floor was now one large open space entombed in dust and grit. Nathan spotted the footprints in the dust even as he ran and changed course to follow them to a flight of metal steps.
He slowed and eased up the steps, watching the door at the top in case the perp’ decided to take a shot back at him when he was trapped on the…
A figure lunged into view and Nathan saw a pistol aimed directly at him as he hurled himself to one side and vaulted over the side of the staircase. A plasma shot boomed and he felt the heat of it whip past his face, a bright ball of electric blue energy that smashed instead into the tiles far below and exploded with a bright flare of fearsome light.
Nathan plummeted downward and slammed into the floor, rolled hard to his right to absorb some of the impact and then sprawled onto his back as he saw a shadowy figure leap from the top of the stairwell and plunge toward him.
Nathan rolled to his left and fired as he went, but his wild shot went wide of the target as the figure landed cat–like nearby and sprinted away from him. Nathan took aim, but the figure crashed through another doorway and vanished from sight.
Nathan hauled himself to his feet and dashed after the perp’, his legs and hips aching from the long fall as he plunged through the doorway and into a corridor, then ducked as a plasma shot crackled toward him in a vibrant halo of searing heat and light.
The plasma charge splattered the wall behind him, sprayed white–hot plasma across his back. Nathan wriggled out of his jacket as he smelled it burning and sprinted in pursuit of the shooter as he rushed up a darkened staircase at the far end of the corridor. Nathan aimed as he ran and fired three shots, not really trying to hit the perp’ but more interested in denying him the chance to fire again as Nathan sprinted up the stairs two at a time, his chest and lungs heaving.
The stairwell backed up on itself, climbing higher inside the building and Nathan could hear the shooter’s footfalls as he ascended with super–human speed. Nathan labored up the stairwells as his thighs began to surge with pain and his breath was sucked in with strained gasps. Sweat beaded on his forehead and drenched the shirt on his back as he climbed upward until he reached the top floor and heard a door crash somewhere ahead of him.
Nathan staggered onto the corridor and saw the door at the far end opening out onto the roof, could smell the slightly less pungent air gusting inward from outside as he ran on legs rubbery with fatigue until he reached the door and he crouched down. He knew with certainty that the shooter would be waiting for him to appear, probably even now was aiming his pistol at the open doorway. Even as he considered that he heard the sound of more sirens bearing down on Phoenix Heights and knew that if the shooter hung around much longer he’d be boxed in and unable to escape.
Nathan took a breath and then aimed outside and fired two shots randomly at where he assumed the gunman would be waiting before he hurled himself out and rolled along the roof, coming up on one knee and searching for the shooter.
The roof was empty.
Nathan blinked and then he heard the hum of a plasma pistol right behind him.
He looked over his shoulder and saw a hooded youth standing atop the roof door house, having vaulted there on his bionic legs right after crashing through the doorway. From beneath the shadows of his hood, two inhuman looking red eyes glowed. Nathan, his voice ragged with exhaustion, shrugged.
‘Can we call it a draw?’
The youth aimed his pistol more carefully and Nathan saw the bulky weapon was not a pistol at all but a military blaster, something that should never have reached the streets of the city. He had heard rumors of such weapons occasionally being found in the possession of major criminals but never before in the hands of a street youth.
‘You’ve already shot one police officer,’ Nathan cautioned, ‘you shoot another and you’ll be in Tethys Gaol by tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t shoot him,’ came the warbling reply, translated by a digital device attached to the inside of the youth’s throat. ‘But there ain’t no sense in lettin’ you go now.’
His eyes peered at Nathan from within the darkened veil of his hood, points of red light that betrayed further bio–enhancements to the optical nerves allowing for infra–red and perhaps even ultraviolet vision.
‘No sense in killing me either,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘You can’t win. The cavalry’s here.’
The sirens were louder now, screeching in through the thin veils of cloud drifting in the city’s atmosphere and obscuring the starlight.
The youth seemed to shrug and then he aimed the pistol between Nathan’s eyes.
‘Good chase, cop.’
Nathan flinched and then suddenly a blast of air hammered the roof of the building as a police cruiser shot over their heads with scant inches to spare. Nathan saw the cruiser’s exhaust hurl the shooter clear off the door house and over Nathan’s head, even his bionic limbs incapable of saving him as he crashed down onto the unforgiving surface of the roof. The weapon flew from his grasp, the youth stunned and incapacitated as Nathan leaped across to him and drove one knee between his shoulder blades as he reached around and drew his wrists together.
The police cruiser landed nearby on the roof and Betty climbed out, her pistol in her hand as she shouted at him.
‘What the hell happened to line of sight?!’
Nathan locked the manacles into place and stood up, his legs still weak with fatigue.
‘I did what you said,’ he replied with a smile, ‘I kept line of sight, with this guy. You wanna question him or do I get to do it?’
***
IV
Tethys Gaol
Xavier Reed awoke with a start as a claxon ripped through the field of his slumber like a plasma ray through black velvet. He sat bolt upright on his bunk as the stench of closely packed humanity hit him, of unwashed bodies and stale breath that permeated the thick, hot air like a blanket.
The bunk in his cell was made of tubular titanium, too tough for even the most determined inmate to break up and use as a weapon. The walls were poured concrete with an internal mesh of steel, the mirror above the steel sink and latrine also polished steel. Nothing could be broken, nothing salvaged for e
scape or violence. Battles in this gaol were fought with bare hands, feet and heads, brutal and primal.
The barred cell door clattered open, along with a hundred others on D Block as the “sticks” called the inmates out, so called because of the electrically charged batons they wielded with almost feverish delight on any inmate who was found to be out of line. Xavier stumbled bleary–eyed out of his cell and moved to stand on the gantry overlooking the chow hall two tiers down.
Arranged in two blocks facing each other, with the tables and chairs of the chow hall bolted and welded to the deck between them, the blocks were two tiers high and designed to hold around a hundred inmates. Xavier had counted two hundred twenty at least, most of them sharing cells in twos and threes. As a new face he was allowed a single cell for a short amount of time, a measure designed to protect newcomers from extortion and violence at the mercy of the old hands that ruled the block. In truth, Xavier had found that all the solitary living did was draw attention to the newcomer and give the other inmates time to plan and conspire.
The gantry was filled with cons, all in their orange prison scrip’ overalls and light sneakers. The prison’s environment was 1G, standard gravitational force, created by newly–installed Higgs Boson generators deep within the station. Xavier had heard that in previous years, massive riots had been conducted in zero–G conditions as inmates discarded their gravi–boots in favor of the perceived freedom of flight. The job of clearing up body parts floating around the blocks had not, he had been assured, been for the faint hearted.
D Block was only controlled in name by the sticks. In truth it was the domain of Zak “The Shock” Volt, a lifer with a string of gang kills to his name. Surrounded by an aura of psychosis, Volt was short and stocky, shaven headed and devoid of the biogenic implants favored by many of the block’s inmates. Those implants were always removed before incarceration on Tethys Gaol, meaning that the unenhanced suddenly found themselves at a distinct advantage to their limbless fellow convicts.
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