Novahead

by Steve Aylett

  At least they were uncertain, not bored. But finally they did seem bored. The general sentiment seemed to be that they’d wasted enough time already and here they were. They became reproachful and morose. Alfonso’s face looked like a cow’s. This despair of theirs led me to seek some kind of consolation for them. I evinced stubborn dignity, dazzling indifference, mimsy flirtatiousness, hard-earned sagacity and enigmatic radiance, all in an effort to keep them entertained. Jose looked at me in pained wonder, then became indignant. Alfonso seemed overcome with disbelief and pity, adding a rosy grace note to this depressing shambles of an interrogation.

  ‘Maybe we’re going at this wrong,’ I said. ‘You’re not allowing me much latitude - not enough for truth, anyway. I can’t believe you really want to know, and apparently I’ve nothing more to learn from you. So why don’t we abandon the project as a failure?’

  I was feverish, but I think I made a pretty good case for my remaining meat being of less use than the bits they had claimed so far. I would sooner yield to the micro-banditry of ageing than their surgical persuasions. It was a solid argument. Only the terminally suspicious would assume it came with an agenda.

  They looked disappointed.

  ‘D’you think I’m made of blood?’

  ‘Come now, you’ve got more than you give yourself credit for,’ said Alfonso.

  I succumbed. ‘That’s it. This interrogation sucks. It’s the worst one I’ve ever been in. You guys don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And that’s the one thing you didn’t count on. You’ve cheapened a beautiful evening with the torture theme. I didn’t think you were scared enough to need this much chair.’ I did not keep from them the fact that they appalled me and that their end could be traced within the stained fringe of any horizon.

  Jose breathed hard but didn’t say anything. He looked genuinely hurt. This sudden gravity seemed to mature him.

  ‘What was the man’s name, senor,’ Alfonso asked almost in a whisper, not looking at me and wandering way off the point. ‘The man in Atlanta who disappeared the killers.’

  He clutched at his stomach, vaguely puzzled. Then he folded down hinge by hinge, finally slapping his face to the floor.

  I recognised the motion immediately - someone had just discharged a Bohr gun through the wall. A Bohr worked via quantum entanglement, using the particles of the loaded bullet to activate those of its entangled partner in the victim. The loaded bullet was ejected after the operation, as re-firing would only re-install the same quantum bullet in the same impact position.

  Jose was up and at the metal wall of the garage door, drawing the Calico while at the same time activating what looked like a counterwave belt studded with vortex coils - the Bohr gun wouldn’t harm him. A rectangle of light appeared at his side - an inset door had opened in the riser and Jose was instantly brawling with someone in front of it. The light flickered like a bulb battered and pinged by moths. I slipped the bloody left strap with my thinned left hand, releasing the right strap and attending to the leg fastenings as the small door fell closed and subfire flared in the gloom, smashing a fusebox. There was some ballistic commotion outside, the fusillade shifting gears back and forth in the signature syntax of the brotherhood. Apparently they were falling over themselves to shoot each other, or perhaps one other person who was unarmed. Jose threw his assailant aside and escaped through the small door. The gunfire changed register as the new element joined.

  I staggered through tintacks and obtainium - the frayed view between my eyelashes revealed a woman with mustard-yellow hair, eyes the dead green of visa paper and a mouth that could tear out the sacred heart of Jesus. I confirmed the presence of a nose only much later. She was toting a Bohr 5.56mm rifle and slung under her purple leather coat was a hardshell shotgun, at a minimum. She’d probably weigh no more than 80 pounds drenched in blood. ‘Lux Murphy - FBI.’

  ‘Good - I need drugs.’

  The garage door was lifting like a curtain before a stage.

  5 VERSUS

  We stood before the swelling rectangle until the door grated into place above us. All I could see at first was a collision of dustclouds, and then the dim skeletons of cars. Shell-track was underlining lengths of air as someone begot bullets into the atmosphere. In fact the shifting time-values attested to a galore of factions. Whether a bullet is a particle or a wave depends on your observation - head-on or as a bystander. Some of the slugs were pinging around in here.

  We ran into the fanfare of gunfire, past a crushed yellow cab that lay on its roof. It had cracked like an egg but hadn’t been stripped yet. We scrambled into an old crater, testament to the end of a bomb-zombie whose final act had trenched the street. Weeds now fringed the suicide’s ground zero and I peered over this into the airborne dust.

  I could tell that aside from a few preliminary outrages the battle hadn’t really kicked off. These public quarrels involving the brotherhood were open to everyone. Jose was somewhere, I could hear his Calico. There were also some kids who had probably been out playing real murder ARGs. Bullets were the only vitamin source they ever ingested and they’d react to injuries like a sugar high. For good measure a rogue sentient gunhead sprinted and rattled about like a toy crane, propelled by impulses that synchronised with the skirmish by dumb coincidence.

  Prowler light-bars were pulsing in the smoke. The brotherhood - active ignorance in its cleanest form. It was many years since they had felt the need to give a motive for an arrest. Like the behaviour of their suspects, it was assumed to be instinctive and innate. After all the recent collapses the cops had found themselves strangely denuded. They had proved too backward to be employable for manual labour; were declared too careless and forgetful to plant seeds and too aggressive even to stand sentry. So there was an unspoken agreement that they should carry on as before, supervising the carnage at large.

  They hit one of the kids and the pieces of her hung apart, flopping wet to the sidewalk. The smoke cleared a little and there he was, in eye-popping 3D: Chief Blince, the man primarily responsible for depicting law enforcement in Beerlight city. Seniority by sheer biomass. His philosophy was the most complete fossil of its kind ever found. I could have sworn I saw a gravitational tide around him, the hidden physics of hypocrisy, its sickly scaffolding shoring up his bulk. He raised a bullhorn. ‘I’m having a lotta fun over here, nearly more than I can handle. Sure you don’t wanna join me? Even the coldest among you gotta feel tempted. Use of deadly force is authorised, as usual. Nuns, bargain-hunters, unbiased observers - I’ve damaged them all.’ He talked a little more but that was the gist of it. The ballistic charm escalated, echoes slapping back between the stale, half-eaten buildings.

  The Fed girl rolled over, handing me a rifle whose architecture was densely ornamented with crazy golden scrollwork and other ceremonial lavishness. I wasn’t new to exotic ordnance but I’d never seen anything like it. It looked like a gun built by Aztecs. The body was zoom-flake pineapple gold upholstered in burgundy leather round the stock and fore-end.

  ‘You want me to...’

  ‘You’re ready to do more than that.’

  I’d dismissed it as a coffee table gun but under all the translucent tortoiseshell it looked to be a rail cannon, its barrel the width of a toilet-paper tube. I test-fired a single shot that left the flared bellmouth with no more sound than a snapping icicle. Such experiments always aroused opposition or the pretence of it in the hope of profit, and I could see the cops perking up. Through the telescopic sight I watched them dart this way and that amid their roadblock, under a sky ulcerated with clouds. I knew at last where we were - I could see behind them the bruise-blue silhouette of Olympus Dump. I pressed the firing stud on repeat-fire, the volley sounding like the flurring of a tight deck of cards. Later I learned the gun was smartened, the rails charged with contrary accelerant powered by the victim’s preference to live. That so many of the shots smacked the dirt well short of the blockade was due more to the cops’ despair than my rusty aim. But enough hit home,
stitching armour and popping cherry lights. Glass exploded into a surf of jumping pearls. Three cops went down, two by ricochet, I think. Many evinced surprise, though they would have been baffled if their gunfire were not reciprocated.

  Recoil is like hearing your own accent. I hadn’t fired a gun in seven years and it felt like someone had punched me in the shoulder. I’d forgotten, it was a real workout.

  Guns started snapping off all over, unexacting but lively. Jose came out of nowhere, trotting to a crouching halt behind the crinkled snout of the flipped cab. He wasn’t our ally but of course he was versus the cops so he was happy to hunker nearby on our right but at a slight angle. The ARG kids were on our left behind a fallen gun shop billboard, also at a slight angle that satisfied their independence. Ideally a complete circle would allow for everyone. Without the cops, our three emplacements could close to a triangle. The crappiest arrangement would be a square. Why? I pictured a conflict fractal, the same patterns repeated at every scale.

  The girl Murphy had switched to a Kratos triage rifle, blasting monochrome judex ammo that hit quite low in the overall composition. A grenade went off and the debris sprayed forward. The little pop-spanner lost its head and stood still, motivations forgotten. A kid skidded forty feet before rolling loosely to rest, and the cops had a field day emptying bullets into the already lifeless and boring body.

  These shots and explosions inevitably seemed mere frivolities to those not involved in our dispute, and several passers-by stopped to corrugate their foreheads in our direction. One in particular also held up a dog, its frowning face next to his own doubling the sentiment of puzzled disapproval. It was a great bit of work and I started laughing. But when I shouted at the Fed girl to look at the dog I found I was pointing at empty air, the passers-by having satisfied their curiosity and moved on. My voice petered out even as I vouched for the dog’s dependability. I couldn’t blame Murphy for her look of disbelief.

  ‘Give yourselves up,’ bellowed Blince through the loudhailer, ‘if you dare.’ I could tell he was barely paying attention. Rather than moving upward in his career he was swelling without any special direction. ‘I conquered my fear of betrayal, so can you. Surrender at the nearest and dearest opportunity and we’ll extend you every courtesy, up to and including arbitrary blame and exquisite violence.’

  ‘Hardly a novel danger,’ I shouted. I was getting into the swing of things. Someone else asked what securities they were offering by way of guarantee. This was met with the traditional silence from the brotherhood and the ballistic exchange continued.

  Everyone was up and at it, running around and enjoying themselves. The triage fire was barely dividing, heading straight for the roadblock. The cops hurled curses at us for finding fault with them, yet they were the first to suggest that we throw down our own weapons. They complained that we had offered them no payment and we countered that they should therefore not be here. It was the old argument backed by the grand old wall of fire. Nothing was too rich or precise for it. Did it feel forced? Maybe I was projecting.

  Jose didn’t help. He had switched to single-shot and was firing in a contrary style that was only heightened by his obvious self-satisfaction. For a while he scuttled several feet backward with every shot, as if mirroring the bullet’s trajectory. Then he would shout a word inaudibly at the same instant he fired, so that even the finest marksmen felt they were missing something. Finally his encouraging cry of ‘Go!’ just after shooting, supplanted by his peering through an opera glass to spectate the bullet’s progress, created in everyone a sense of dismal failure and boredom.

  A burning squadcar peeled off, snapping over the headless free gun and fishtailing from side to side. Then it slowed to a stop, the driver emerging to roll around and beat at the flames, or perhaps he was energetically waving his arms and legs to communicate something he’d realised amid this extremity. Several kids shot at him, not with the wholehearted delight one would expect but with a grim maturity, as though it was a duty. I jerked my head around at a sharp explosion. Jose was replaced where he stood by a cloud of blood. Blince was firing a Hardballer while stuffing his face with a submarine sandwich.

  My rail gun flurred on empty. Murphy tapped me on the arm and I saw she was priming some sort of goop unit. She pitched it and we ran. The muscle grenade expanded, ramming the street with meat. The undifferentiated tissue began dissolving almost immediately, but it was enough to clog everyone in position for several moments. We quickly left the messy series of reprimands and counter-reprimands behind us.

  We found the Mantarosa and I opened a pint screen in the dash. Madison Drowner frowned out. ‘Why don’t you come through?’

  ‘Got company - coker.’

  ‘Fed?’

  ‘And the Hand’s missing from the recharging well. I need your help on launch windows for a timebomb.’

  ‘Pipe or sphere?’

  ‘Sphere.’

  ‘Transparent kinda like a powerball?’

  ‘More metallic colours like a Christmas decoration, but faceted.’

  ‘It’s probably a Vanzetti LPR - localised progress reset device. There are three default settings: ten minutes, ten hours, 24 hours. You look like hell.’

  I peered in a wing-mirror - my face was bruised purple black across the middle, like there was a vulture flying out of my eyeline. My hair was spiky with dried blood. ‘Colour me damaged, babe. Back soon.’

  ‘See that you are.’

  I popped the beak of the car to free the swan unit. Folded down to the size of a toy harp, it was like an obstetric sculpture in white plastic. ‘Wake up,’ I whispered, and the swan unfolded itself wing by wing, tilting to stand, and raising its head last. Its eyes blinked on. It looked cute. I grabbed its face by some jowls which extended automatically for just such occasions. ‘You crazy swan,’ I cried, tugging the jowls. ‘You crazy swan! I love ya!’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said the swan.

  ‘You crazy swan! Anyways, I need you to look out for new arrivals at the Stina Gate.’

  The swan hopped away from me, waddled on the ground a little, and took off, flapping into an iron sky.

  6 DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WHOOP

  At the hotel Murphy fixed herself an October Surprise and sat on a smashed TV whose innards looked like a city with kidney-coloured streets. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened a can of water. My left hand felt like a wedge of poison sticks. I’d wrapped it in a strip of rotten curtain patterned with brown roses. The beating was enough to prompt me to put everything else aside and deal with the pain. ‘I think my eye’s blown.’

  ‘Lose much blood?’

  ‘I’ve got DNA base pairs I haven’t even used yet. That was nice of you to haul my chestnuts out of the blaze back there. Kind of a miracle.’

  ‘So’s bleeding upwards.’

  ‘Was I doing that again? They seemed determined to find me mistaken. Their ancient form of wonder-working depends on it. Pretending you’re not helpless is just a coping strategy. I would have died for nothing.’

  ‘All do.’

  I lit a shock absorber. My alertness was for her sake - as was the fact that I was awake atall.

  ‘As for the broken nose, I’ve decided to take it as a distinction - one of many bad decisions in my life. How’d you find me?’

  ‘Hole in the gap. You reversed into the story like a Florida gran, Atom. What’s the connective tissue?’

  ‘No mystery there. A slabhead warned me off the kid so I got serious. Then I found the Mexicans fiending for him at the Gate. They screwed up with a chronobomb. I’ve seen better timing from a stuffed olive. But the banditos caught me off-balance - I’ve been out of town a long time. There seems to be way less torque under the hood these days, but maybe I haven’t engaged enough to feel it yet.’

  ‘Fed training says the most dangerous town is one where the advent of crime is very recent and its novelty keeps everyone wasteful and imprecise, thinking they’re proving something. I don’t think there are any
towns like that anymore. Why’d you leave?’

  ‘I figured out what the cops were doing right. But when I incorporated the lesson, they didn’t care for it. Now I get back and find Cortez is growing human in the ground.’

  She smiled. ‘Yup. Neon headstone, flashing arrow pointing jauntily down. Casket with a half-lid, the works. Inscription says “This Tombstone is Not a Toy”. I guess there’s justice if you dig deep enough in a graveyard.’

  ‘No, that’s just forgetting.’ I dragged on the shocker. ‘Well, you’ve given me no cause to doubt you’re human, at least. How long you been here?’

  ‘When bad things happen to good people.’

  ‘Always? Thought you were from out of town.’

  She humphed. ‘I got assigned right here on the seamy side of life.’

  ‘It’s the seams that hold it together.’

  ‘What I kept telling them. They interpreted it as dud loyalty tuning. Got a burn notice from the ruin.’

  ‘Can they afford to burn anyone these days?’

  ‘There was some knock-on when the Pentagon went up five years ago. Thank god the populace hadn’t the balls to take over even when there was a corpse at the wheel.’

  ‘When payback has atrophied for that long, it loses its spring.’