I head for the exit. When I’m halfway toward the front door and next to the central bar, I notice the blue pixelated surfaces in the street are becoming better defined by the second: lights from a squiddie!
I duck through the waitress entrance into the bar and get low; this time, I remember to shut off my helmet lights. I silently set the leech bag down and slide my backpack off to get the runner.
As I pull the cylindrical runner out roughly a foot long and a hand-span wide, Puo whispers over the comm-link, “They’re sniffing around the back door. Another one is in the street out front.”
Sweat drips off me inside the helmet. I really need to turn down the internal heater.
They’re closing me in. My mouth feels as dry as sandpaper.
I reach out and open the nearest cabinet in the bar hoping to hide in it and praying it doesn’t creak. It doesn’t, but it’s full of broken glass. I try the cabinet next to it—full of shattered plates.
That’s when I realize two things: one, I can make those details out, which means the light is getting brighter. And two, the silt. The silt is disturbed from where I passed. It’s like walking through snow.
I only brought one runner—seems so foolish now.
I ready the runner to head east, and set the delay to zero. I wish there was a way to tell it to kick up as much silt as possible. It has enough smarts to avoid debris and to try and avoid squiddies. But if the squiddies catch an image of it, recognizing it, it’s over.
The back door leading out to the courtyard slams open.
Fuck! The squiddie out front is so close it’s like blue pixelated daylight. And now another squiddie is coming through the back entrance I used, to sweep the space.
There’s nowhere to go.
Oh, God—I hope they don’t fight over me, using me as some kind of rag doll to pull apart between them in their enthusiasm to drag something to the surface for their masters.
Metal objects clatter back in the kitchen. Low light shines onto the ceiling from the direction of the service doors with circular windows.
Would the sudden depth decompression from a squiddie puncturing my suit be enough to kill me instantly? Damn—I don’t think so. I’m only two hundred feet down.
A wedge of light on the ceiling from the service doors appears, getting larger—the door’s opening!
I hold up the runner and let it loose. Immediately, it shoots off, sounding like a small engine.
I make myself as small as possible, tucked behind the bar.
The service doors boom! open, sounding like they fly off of their hinges.
The main dining room is bathed in a white light so bright the nightvision auto-shuts off to protect me. The light holds for a split second. There’s a cloud of silt around me.
The gangly squiddie suddenly shoots off, knocking over tables and smacking against the bar as it scrambles after the runner.
I stifle a scream and squeeze down on myself, trying to make myself as small as possible. Broken glass falls around me.
My muscles ache from clenching. My heart pumps in my chest. Sweat pours down the sides of my face.
The bright lights of the squiddie fade quickly. The reverberations in the bar taper off. I want to wait longer, be sure it’s safe, but there’s no time.
Now or never.
I pop up slowly, the nightvision back in place. “Where are they?” I ask Puo. I can’t see any.
“Half split after the runner. The other half are in the courtyard. Get out of there.”
I’m already moving by the time Puo offers the unneeded advice. Once I’m through the broken window and on the narrow side street, I initiate the jump sub-routine.
It’s the fastest way to move through the water while disturbing as little of the water column as possible. The flow jets are faster, but louder—and if I had them, I’d damn well be using them. Now isn’t the time for subtlety. More squiddies, and other not-so-easily-fooled assets, are undoubtedly on the way.
I jump; the anti-gravity suit auto-adjusts my buoyancy and little water jets on my back propel me up and forward. I’m careful to stay below the three-story roofline.
I’m almost too afraid to look up.
Two jumps northward feel like an eternity to complete and bring me to a junction in the streets. I turn west.
The crusted-over cars all facing the opposite direction announce that I’m going the wrong way down a one-way street. What can I say? I’m a rebel.
I can make out just enough of the blue pixelated surfaces to not bump into any of the big stuff. But the top of the buildings on my right hand side are far more defined—likely from the halo of lights in the courtyard I’m leaving behind.
Three more jumps and I come out where a canal used to be. And just on the other side of the canal, salvation: a tramline that connects back to the main railway through Amsterdam.
I take the opportunity to divest myself of the leech bag. I set it off to the side of the street, semi-hidden by laying it up against a parked, old-school land-car.
Puo interrupts in a rush, “They found the runner, and are doubling back—”
I leap toward the other side of the canal.
Puo continues. “—Half of the other half of squiddies back in the courtyard have stormed into the restaurant.”
Shit. I land in the middle of the canal and leap again.
“I’m almost to the tram line.”
Puo doesn’t say anything, which only makes me feel even more panicked.
I touch down near the parallel metal tramlines on the ground. It’s not that Puo doesn’t have anything to say. It’s that Puo’s too scared to say something that would distract me. Or he’s keeping even worse news from me that neither of us can do anything about.
My hands are shaking as I unshoulder my backpack and rifle through the bag for the rider—a heavy piece of powered equipment that Puo and I invented just for this job that’s similar to a zip line trolley. The idea is based off of zip-lining, except using Europe’s old railways instead of ropes as a quick getaway.
I clip the rider on, shoulder my backpack and make sure I have a good grip on the rider, holding on with both hands. “I’m linked up,” I tell Puo. “Here we go.”
Even with a tight grip the device nearly rips out of my hands. Zero to full speed in a second. We’ll need to change that.
My forearms strain, burn from the effort of staying alive and out of jail. My legs splay up behind me.
The device itself is silent. But the sound of the rubber wheels running over metal sounds excessive in my desire to be invisible.
Shit. I zoom up to an abandoned tram on the track blocking the way. I slow down and stop. My hands tremble slightly as I unhook the rider and I’m constantly looking all around me for squiddies about to descend. The squiddies can’t hear the rider, can they?
I tell Puo my situation and ask about the squiddies.
Puo answers in a dead-serious tone, “They’ve picked up the first of your jump sites.”
Blood pulses against my ears for the twenty-foot journey past the eerie, silent tram. Does using the rider kick up a silt trail squiddies can follow? It has to, doesn’t it?
The surrounding environment is painted in weak blue pixels as I hurry past the tram. I see no growing spotlights of blue pixelated detail emerge from any approaching squiddies.
Once on the other side of the tram, I clip the rider back on and gratefully zoom off. I’m moving north so fast that after a few short minutes I’m approaching the junction to the main rail lines.
I use the controls near my thumb to slow down. The main railways run through the center of the city. Where the tramlines connect to the main lines, there are at least twelve different tracks in a wide swath.
“I’m at the rail junction,” I tell Puo. “Which railway?” The open space of the railways help the nightvision pick up more light. The rails are tight, parallel blue pixelated lines.
“Fifth one from where you entered, starting with the number one closest
to you and twelve farthest from you.”
“Roger, that.” I unhook the rider, and mentally count out five to the right railway.
I lightly jump toward the right rail—
SCREECH! White light floods the railway. A squiddie explodes out from behind a crusted-over railcar a hundred and fifty feet down the tracks.
BOOM! The railcar falls on its side.
I jerk in my trajectory downward. Sweat pours off my the sides of my head. I can feel my chest trying to burst through the anti-gravity suit.
The white light is darting toward me.
“Shhhit! Shit! Shit!” I’m freaking descending way too slow!
“What! What’s going on!” Puo screams back.
“Squiddie made me!”
“Get to the surface!”
“Can’t! Not going to make it!” I touch down to the side of the rail. I drop to my knees and fumble with the rider.
“Fuck!” My hands are shaking so bad I can’t get it clipped.
“Isssaa!” Puo yells. “Get to the surface!”
I can hear the squiddie’s massive body rushing toward me through the water.
Click. The rider, by the grace of God, connects. I hold on with both hands and kick it to full throttle.
I’m yanked hard. My rotator cuffs almost pop. I try and tuck my legs in behind me so the squiddie can’t grab them, but I’m moving too fast, and they splay out wildly.
The white light of the squiddie shines brightly on me. It takes several seconds of hanging on for dear life to realize I have not been wrapped up by an overzealous squiddie. The light is slowly starting to fall behind.
“Puo,” I say shakily, “The rider is outrunning it—”
“Oh, thank the sweet Lord!”
“But it knows I’m here. It must have already called ahead—”
“Yeah,” Puo says, obviously looking at his displays. “Yeah, it did. Looks like they already calculated the optimum place to capture you.”
“Where?” Please God, don’t let there be any abandoned trams on the line.
“There’s a bend in the railway tracks a mile up ahead. While you’re on a straight line, none of them are in the right position to intercept you at that speed. But they can cut the distance at the turn.”
“Okay.” I gulp and try and think quickly. “How far is the squiddie behind me?” The nightvision kicks back on.
“Two hundred feet and opening.”
“How fast am I opening?”
“Ten feet a second,” Puo says.
“And how long does it take me to get to the surface?”
“In these freaking conditions, eighty to ninety seconds. I see where you’re going. I’ll figure out the optimum spot where you should let go.”
“Roger, that,” I say breathlessly. My back is starting to ache.
“Oh, crap!” Puo erupts.
“What!”
“The cruiser just launched a HiDAR. Ninety-five seconds to impact.”
“Forget optimal, tell me when the HiDAR is fifty seconds out!”
“Roger!”
HiDAR is a high-resolution high-ping-rate sonar system. Imagine instead of your standard fixed closed-circuit camera system, you have multiple high-definition cameras in each room that can render the space for its masters in perfect three-dimensional detail. Oh, and they can push that information to all their gangly lackeys below the water.
The only weakness of the HiDAR is that it’s downward looking (the “D” in HiDAR). So if you can get above its acoustic imagining beam, then it can’t see you.
“Fifty seconds!” Puo shouts.
I let go, and increase my buoyancy to the maximum. I also curl myself into a tight ball. It probably won’t help anything, but it feels like it should.
The water rushes over me as I tumble toward the surface. The sound of the rider continues on the track.
I’m one hundred thirty feet deep and rushing toward the surface with the depth readout floating and tumbling around me.
I catch blue pixelated glimpses of the track below me, increasingly becoming both more detailed and more distant.
Eighty feet deep.
I hear the splash down of the HiDAR, and its mechanical whir as it sets itself up.
“Puo,” I say, “I’m forty feet from the surface.”
“Roger, that,” Puo says relieved. “As soon as you broach, initiate the subroutine for pickup.”
“Where’s the cruiser?” I ask. These anti-gravity suits were the catalyst for all this shit lately of moving coasts and dead bodies and broken hearts. I don’t want anyone to know we have them. They’re only supposed to exist as top-secret tech for a very small select Special Forces group.
“Does it matter?” Puo asks. There’s an edge of worry to his question.
“No, I guess not.” I broach the surface and initiate the pickup subroutine. If they arrest me, they’ll definitely learn about the suits.
The counter for pickup routine lights up, snapping vertically to the distant horizon. Five seconds.
The night is still clear. The North Sea has a light chop to it. The half moon shines down on me, makes me feel small, lonely. It’s like a whole different world up here.
Three seconds.
The air traffic is light in the region. One of those red streaking lights ten thousand feet above should be Puo.
Two seconds. One.
I always feel it first in my stomach, that something has gone horribly wrong in the world. And then I’m already several hundred feet in the air, falling upward, before I can force myself to reorient.
These anti-gravity suits are freaking awesome; at least when you’re not about to get arrested or die in them.
If you close your eyes, it almost feels natural.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO DAYS LATER, Puo and I are in south Essen, Germany, meeting our buyer, Vasily Kafarov, to make the exchange. It’s early evening, but the sun has already set on account of Germany being further north than I’m used to, plus it’s autumn.
It’s also freaking cold—I was born and raised in the American south. Fifty degrees is cold damn it. Even buttoned up tight in a warm navy-blue winter trench coat with the fur-lined hood pulled up over my straight black hair, I still get unpleasant wafts of cold air sneaking down my neck—I should’ve worn a crew-neck sweater instead of the peach-colored v-neck I went with.
Puo and I are walking through the dirt parking lot toward Der Kohlebergmann, The Coal Miner, a chic, underground bar and a microcosm of Essen.
The city is a mishmash of three different cities in time. It was once an industrial center, but turned to technology after the manufacturing decline, and a number of corporations have their headquarters here. But after the mega-quake hit, it had to adjust to suddenly being a port city.
The result of this mishmash is Der Kohlebergmann, a failed coal mine repurposed with the newfound wealth the coast readjustment brought, and patronized by upper-middle-class techies.
What the Der Kohlebergmann owners hadn’t counted on was how a bar two hundred feet underground with only one way in or out would appeal to a different kind of crowd—the kind of crowd that doesn’t necessarily trust the person or people they’re meeting with.
Specks of loose dirt crunch under my midnight-blue, knee-high boots, and Puo’s scuffed-up yellow construction boots. He hates the cold as much as me. He’s huddled under a honey-colored insulated down coat with the collar flared up for style. A bright purple leather satchel bounces against his fluffed-up coat as he walks—he looks like a walking beehive with some flare.
The entrance to the coal mine is lit up with a bright neon-pink sign, complete with a flashing yellow arrow pointing to a dark hole in the hill leading downward. I feel like I should be in an old Pee-wee Herman movie.
The leech bag worked as designed, and the pickup off the merchant’s hull went much smoother than my near capture two days ago. Now, four of the metal-sheet piano rolls are tucked into my tan-colored canvas messenger bag slung aro
und my chest, bouncing gently against my thigh—my black leggings are doing little to protect me from the little stabs of coldness—while the fifth piano roll is in Puo’s garish purple satchel.
The bar’s tunnel entrance is paved and gently slopes downward into the earth’s gullet. The edges of the tunnel are rough-hewn and look authentic to what they were hundreds of years ago, which I think is supposed to make you feel the history of the place but fails miserably for me. I kinda doubt coal miners trudged to work under sparse but chic modern lights that have been strung up and where every third light is a black light. But what do I know? It could’ve been a trendy place to work several hundred years ago, a forerunner to the tech sector.
At the bottom of the short walk is a metal elevator, closed off by a chain-link fence with old rusted and dented signs on it that say things like, “Safety First,” “Caution,” and “Help keep this place clean.” The “Safety First” sign is a bit rich, considering that the metal elevator looks like a death trap. Of all the things to update, that’d be where I would’ve started.
A large German man is at the gate getting people to sign waivers and check identifications. He’s an older individual with a scruffy beard and a potbelly, but looks like he knows how to handle himself, even if he looks like he was born on the stool on which he sits and is permanently entrenched there.
As for signing the waivers and recording our presence, we let two device-to-device transfers of five hundred quants (the preferred digital currency of ne’er-do-wells) sign for us without any problem.
I’m pretty sure that, as soon as the local mob learned of the utility of this place, they either inserted their own people here or leaned on the owners heavily.
Puo and I are alone in the shaky, death-trap elevator as it descends. I have to spread my feet apart and bend my knees to keep from getting jerked around. The only obvious modification to the elevator was that it used to be open to the raw tunnel walls around it, but now the openings of the elevator are covered in a very tight metal-mesh weave—probably to prevent drunk morons from losing a limb or a finger.
The air gets warmer as we descend. I relish the feeling of the burgeoning heat on my face, until I finally succumb to unbuttoning my trench coat some. Puo unzips his down coat.
The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2) Page 3