my exchange with the drone, and encrypted them before deletion. I needed to make an account for the lost data, so I accessed it's hardware log and wrote a bogus report of a power failure with that exact time stamp. I also wrote a recommendation for hardware maintenance. I deleted the record of my entry from the onboard memory and closed the maintenance routine. My last command was to tell the machine to return to normal function.
I let the plastic sheet close behind me as I walked away, the air drumming with the stabilizer field as the cam drone levitated away. A corroded door took me to the roof of the building. The entrance to the tube was a service tunnel, the keypad to which had been hacked open several times. I clambered over the few stacked crates that served as steps to the hatch and turned my face uncomfortably upward to punch all zeros in the keypad. The hatch hissed and blew out steam as it slid open. A short leap from the crates put me in reach of the bottom rung of a ladder set into the wall of the tube's entrance.
There were other ways to get out of the slums, among them was a lift that went to the tram a few levels up. I could have also tried to pass a scanning gate in a cement staircase near the housing district. But those ways were often closed for servicing or other more vague reasons. I figured the truth was that traffic from the slums was limited. When those paths were open, they were often monitored covertly, or an Agency checkpoint would be in place. The tubes had become a route for those that didn't want to be seen.
After the vertical entrance, the tube plateaus to a flat walkable complex of tunnels and exhaust shafts. Some tunnels have been walled off with sheet metal and jagged steel wire or they have been rendered unusable by stacks of garbage—mostly broken crates and discarded soy paper. I walked by one such corridor where the trash had been piled in a hump in the corner. A pair of tiny points of reflected light peered back at me, blinking under the shadow before disappearing.
I rounded the next corridor and froze. A body was dangling by his hands from the ceiling, the figure silhouetted by a flood lamp on the wall. The slender cable wrapped around both wrists, tethering to a pipe that ran the length of the chamber. He was dressed in a short coat the color of smoke and olive pants that were ragged at the bottom. His shirt had been split up the middle, showing a bloody symbol scored into his sternum. The symbol was made up of two vertical slashes bridged with a slanted slash over the top, like the tip of a knife. Blood still dripped down the wounds and pooled on the floor, but it was thick and dark. He'd been here a while.
His pockets were empty but his coat contained a few hidden compartments lined with a slick black polymer. I recognized the polymer as Zero Black, a material we had used back in the war to hide our weapons from penetrating scans. This man had likely been a smuggler, on his way to peddle Grav or data cores to the upper levels. The Razors had stopped him.
I reached up with the fingers of my left hand and tested the strength of the cable, it was high-tension and would have been difficult to cut with anything other than a knife from the Razors. I couldn't feel the texture of the cable through my robotic arm, only the resistance against the servos.
I had lost my original arm on a hill in Eurasia while I was a Marine, during what is now called Humanity's Last War. An armored personnel transport had been rigged with a backpack of high-explosive gel, the improvised bomb wired into the ignition. The resulting blast tore the driver side door off its hinges and hurled the fiber-steel liner into my armpit where it gouged out most of my top rib and my arm up to the joint at my shoulder. Amcorp, the corporation that owned my contract, didn't want to lose me from active duty. They'd spent the extra creds to get me fitted with a cybernetic arm replacement.
Mine was one of many military models, all sleek and black, formed to look like muscle and sinew with silver disks at the flexible joints. For the most part I kept it hidden under my coat, but it would never show on a scan. I had been in special forces, tasked primarily with espionage and covert ops. My arm had come coated in Zero Black and sported some other special features. Typical cybernetic limbs have safeties to prevent their performance from exceeding human limits. Reiko, my cyber limb technician friend, had helped me remove those limits.
I pinched the cable between the black fingers of my left arm and rubbed them together. The cable frayed and popped until it snapped. I caught the smuggler's body as it fell. He didn't deserve to be a road sign for a street gang. He deserved a proper burial, but I knew I couldn't manage it in the tube. My left arm hefted his weight easily, setting him down in what I thought was a lightly trafficked corridor. I dug through a pile of trash until I found enough plastic sheets to cover him.
I thumbed open my mobile, searching the network for schematics of the tube. I couldn't find any. I covered the next hundred or so yards of the corridor, trying to stay clear of the typical routes that I usually took. The only sounds were the humming of fans and the scratching of tiny clawed paws in the wall.
The light clanging of footsteps stopped me before I rounded another corner, hushed voices murmured under the ambient hum. I leaned my face around the edge, using a heavy plastic crate as cover.
“I know you took more than your cut of those pills,” He was a short sinewy man, with a pair of goggles mounted on orange spiked hair, “I want my share, Rask, or I'll take it out of your ass.”
“I found that smuggler first—you know the rule—you get my leftovers,” Rask jabbed a thumb at his chest and kept his other hand on the taped hilt of his knife. His hands were heavily wrapped in strips of thick cloth, leaving just his knuckles and fingers visible.
The other ran fingers into his spiky hair, twisting his face with frustration, “Just gimme some, man. My skin feels like its on fire—just give me one hit of Lectric and that's it, I'll owe you. Just need something to get me going.”
“Damn it, Gram, you already owe me,” Rask drew his knife from a stitched vinyl sheath, a bead of light gleamed from the chisel point and ran down the straight blade, nearly the length of his arm.
Another figure stepped out of the shadows, the lenses of his lowered goggles catching the dim light, “I can hear you all the way down the tunnel, and if you,” He drew his own knife, like carved obsidian in the dark, then pointed a finger at Gram, “Had been doing your job, then you would have seen that one around the corner.” He pointed the tip of his knife in my direction.
I had been seen—I didn't have much choice now. I jabbed my right hand into the empty pocket of my trench coat, pressing the tips of my fingers into the seam, hoping it looked like the barrel of a gun. I stepped out of my hiding place, “I was hoping they would kill each other and save me some creds.”
Rask took a few steps toward me, his knife resting at his hip. His face was thin and pale, track marks ran the length of his arm where he'd been shooting up some street drug, “This tunnel has a toll now, give us your creds and you can walk.”
“It's the bullets, really,” I stepped toward them tilting my fingers in my coat so they would notice it, “They're expensive.”
Gram took his knife off his belt with a shaking hand, “He's bluffing. Scan him, Tork. We'll see what you got.”
Evidently Tork was the one in the shadows who had arrived last. He put a hand up to his goggles and pressed a button.
“It's a rail pistol. It propels a bullet along a magnetized rail, discharging the projectile at high velocity in the shortest time possible,” Tork's scan would take a couple minutes and I hoped I could convince them by then. Sweat began to bead over my eyebrows. If this failed, there was no backup plan.
“You're lying,” Gram was beginning to raise his voice, the echo bouncing weirdly in the tube.
“The wounds it leaves are surgical, not like those clumsy slug throwers the Agents carry. When this hits you, it's like a tramway spike traveling through your organs—you're dead before you hit the ground,” My breath was getting shorter, my pulse pounding in my throat.
Gram's voice reached a high-pitched squeal as he jabbed his knife
my way “Make him stop!”
Tork's goggles rang with a harsh mechanical click, “It's a bluff, he's clean.”
Gram came at me first, raising the gleaming fiber-steel knife over his head. My cybernetic arm caught him by the wrist, twisting until the bones popped liked fresh celery. His scream was like nails in my eardrum, but it didn't stop Rask from lunging at me—his knife stabbing at my belly. I stepped away, moving my grip to Gram's armpit and steadying him with my other hand. I lifted him bodily and hurled him sidelong into Rask, the two of them slamming into the corridor wall that rang like a struck gong. I glanced up to see Tork flinging his hand down as he hurled his knife at my face. I flinched and brought my cybernetic arm up to swat it away—the blade struck the black palm and cleaved it open, sinking down to the wrist. The glowing fiber optics showed like veins as the wound leaked translucent coolant.
Tork turned and sprinted away from me, his hard rubbery boots squealing against the corridor floor, “I need help down here!”
I tore the knife out of the gouge in the robotic flesh and threw the blade to the ground. I tucked the damaged limb against my chest as I ran after him, stumbling over the limp heaps of Gram and Rask. Tork's shadow was already several
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