Nanoshock

by K C Alexander

  I looked down at my knees. To hear him admit it felt like a slap. “Yeah,” I said on a tight exhale. “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  I deserved that one, too. I hated this feeling in my lungs. Hated the tight cramp in my guts, the oxygen turning to acid with every breath. Everything about this felt wrong, felt hard. It shouldn’t have been this hard.

  My fingers dug into my thighs. Tight enough to bruise. “I’m sorry.” It tasted like bile and gasoline. The skin dented around my fingers faded to bone white. “I’m not great at looking at anything but the job in front of me. I’m used to having a linker to keep me on track, so I–”

  “Again!” Indigo gestured heatedly with his food carton. “Why don’t you get it? This isn’t about you–”

  “I know.” I closed my eyes, too tired to meet his intensity. Reframing my interest around something else, somebody else, took effort. I sucked at it. I had never claimed otherwise. What I could do, though, was nut up and meet him on his terms. Face to face. Eye to eye. Anger to whatever the fuck I could manage.

  I’d called him family. I don’t even know what that meant, but now seemed as good a time as any to give it a shot.

  31

  I raised my head. “Listen. I know exactly why I was cut from the team,” I said, firming everything I had. Straightened my back, my neck, shoulders. My voice. “However pissed I was… no, I am,” I corrected abruptly, “there’s a reason I didn’t wreck anybody’s shit over it.”

  “Because we outnumber you?”

  “Stop helping,” I snapped back.

  He shrugged. Waited. One foot uncrossed, planting on the floor beside the mattress like he had all the time in the world. He knew how uncomfortable I felt. Knew I had razor blades in my throat. I didn’t do sorries. Or humility.

  I’d never been backed into a corner like this before.

  I looked down again before he noticed the twisted shape of my scowl. In my thighs, white welts flushed red. They’d go purple in minutes. Then yellow and green as they faded even faster. A minor hurt. A quick recovery.

  Easier in the flesh than the head. Or the ego.

  “I’m trying to say,” I said to my legs, “that I get why I was tossed, and I’d’ve done the same thing if it was one of you. But,” I added, too fast for him to interrupt. I raised my head, once more eye to eye. A goddamn yoyo. “I’ll say it again. I would never willingly fuck you over.” Somehow, the single word I’d meant to frame with emphasis turned into a rising octave.

  The carton crumpled in his hands.

  “Not you,” I spat out, anger slowly rolling up my insides. “Not the team.” It ate at the rest of the shit I didn’t want to feel, fueled itself into a wall between me and the ugly parts of me I didn’t want Indigo’s guilt-ridden fingers in. Or mine. “And not Nanji.”

  For a long, long time, Indigo said nothing. He only stared at me, searched my face. It went on so long that I began to doubt he’d heard me.

  When he set the crushed carton on the floor by my empty, he did so with slow, deliberate care. “I want to know who killed her, Ree.” His anger didn’t go wild like mine. His had always been calmer. Blue heart instead of red flame. “I want to know if you lied to me.”

  So did I. About Nanji, about the mercs sold off and probably butchered like she’d been. I needed to know so much more, and that’s why I needed Indigo again. I needed a place to start.

  “Whoever set it up, whatever is behind it all, I will find out.” His smile framed gritted teeth. “And if nothing else, this MetaCorp raid convinced me of one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to glue myself to your ass until I figure everything out.”

  Shit and a half.

  I wanted so badly to smile. To take a relieved breath and punch him lightly in the chest and welcome him back. I couldn’t. It wasn’t that kind of promise. Scarred skin strained over my fisted knuckles. “Keep your enemies closer, right?”

  He looked up at the stained ceiling. Shook his head and dropped his chin to look me in the face. “Keep your friends close,” he corrected. Then, with a faint, tight smile, added, “You sit somewhere between the two, Ree. I’m not going to lie to you. But our goals align.”

  My mouth dried. Hunger and longing filled the space between my ribs. Anger and bitterness framed it. “What about the others?”

  “I’ve talked with Tashi.”

  I blinked. “She agreed?”

  A nod.

  “Fidelity and Valentine?”

  “Not yet,” he told me, and pushed himself back to his feet. The empty carton by his foot tipped over, chopsticks clicking as they rolled out onto the floor. “They’ve been picking up side work for a couple weeks, I expect them to check in soon. I haven’t spoken to Boone yet,” he added before I could ask, “but he’s more likely to go with the flow.”

  “He trusts you.”

  “Yeah. Get up,” he added, offering a hand.

  I didn’t take it. One, all I had to take it with was my nanosteel arm, and I didn’t like wrapping my fingers around flesh and bone unless I didn’t care if I broke it. Two, my right hand hurt every time I tried to squeeze something. Fucking tissues would need stretching.

  Three, the hell I’d take the help.

  I unfolded my bare legs, grabbed one of my boots and wiggled it on firmly. “You think the rest will sign on?”

  “If Tashi and Boone are game, they’ll come around.”

  Back to a team. A real one, with real goals.

  Goals that included fucking some corporate bullshit up.

  I rubbed at my arm, bent to pick up the Valiant. If I looked ridiculous in a T-shirt and pair of package-empty boxers, I looked even more stupid with the assault rifle slung over my shoulder and street boots flopping around my bare ankles. “What if they don’t?” I finally asked.

  “Don’t get my boxers in a wad,” he replied mildly. He ran one hand over his head, pushing back his hair. Tendrils of blue tucked behind his ears as he gestured for the door. “One thing at a time.”

  A version of zen. Indigo had always looked farther ahead than now, it’s what linkers do. But unlike me, he wasn’t the type to get overwhelmed by choices.

  He watched me as I passed him. “You’ve changed, I think.”

  He’d said that to me before. At the time, it wasn’t nearly so thoughtful. I also thought that maybe, just maybe, he was right.

  Too close. Wasn’t going to touch that yet. I snorted, waving that away as he followed me out. “I’m tired of getting jerked around. At this point,” I said, crass as I knew how, “I’ll suck your pretty brown asshole to get what I need.”

  “Which is?”

  “Knacklock’s role in this clusterfuck.”

  “Oh yeah?” Smug. Maybe smiling? “Prepare to get on your knees.”

  I glanced back at him, single file as we forged through trash and debris. Yeah. A definite smile there, and arrogant as balls. “What’d you find?” I demanded.

  “A link.” He spun a finger in a circle; a suggestion I turn back around before I biffed it. “Just before the raid, a source came back with something I asked him to find. Turns out Kern’s been dealing blackjack behind the scenes. With,” he added behind me, “MetaCorp scouts.”

  “What, these jackmaggots?”

  “Same ones.”

  “Well.” Glee filled me. “Christ on an elephant wall. Aren’t I lucky?”

  “Not yet. These chummers are well trained, endurance at insane levels.” His sound of disgust carried more than a trace of impatience. “They even gave Tashi a go. Short of cracking their chipsets in hope of some data, I’m drawing up blanks. Might need an interrogation specialist,” he added grimly.

  Oh, damn. Serious work, then. Interrogation specialists fall into several street role categories, but they all have one thing in common – a wake of blood and a rep filled with broken souls.

  “Valentine?” I asked. “I know he’s not on board yet, but he’s got the experience.” Although
he ran as our regular munitions specialist, he easily could have gone interrogation. Probably had for a while. He’d chosen the fight out on the streets instead; extra bonus points for corporation hits. Scary motherfucker, a real history of hard slaughterwork. We avoided any opportunity for a fight, neither of us willing to test each other under Indigo’s watch.

  Sexy, though. For an artificially sculpted fantasy.

  “I’d prefer to avoid it,” Digo replied. “Not until he hears me out and agrees to bring you back on.” We approached the room, one of his callused hands pausing on the doorframe. “It’s possible they don’t know anything more than what they’ve immediately dealt with.”

  I shook my head, nudged his arm aside. “I’ve got a gut feeling.”

  His narrow shoulders rose with a deep breath. Squared with a sigh out. “I want to try and get them talking without cracking the chipsets. I have questions I want answered directly.”

  “You want to give them another shot?”

  “As many as it takes,” he replied.

  “You realize that time is very much a problem for me, right?”

  “I know.”

  I raised my tech arm, like a kid in class. “Idea. What about Jax?”

  “We don’t need him.”

  “But–”

  “Riko.” He tapped me on the forehead. Hard. “We can’t use him anyway. Remember?”

  Oh. I scowled. “Life was so much easier when going necro was just a scare tactic.”

  “Never was just a scare tactic,” he replied, saying out loud what we both knew. “But yeah. We’re not going near that fucker.”

  With that, he shoved his way into the room.

  The door creaked as it opened – of course it did. Muerte straightened from her crouch in front of both men, who’d obviously seen some assault and battery. Stoneface’s nose had reknitted, but crookedly. Blood coated both, dried to a rigid crust on their clothes.

  The other guy’s head lolled on his neck, chin to chest.

  “Marital spat?” Muerte asked us, bland as raw balls. “Is it time for makeup sex?”

  “Oh, shut up,” I replied. “Anything from them yet?”

  “Nope. The thing about nanos,” Muerte added cheerfully, “is that it makes biting off your tongue a less than reliable suicide attempt.”

  My eyebrows skyrocketed. “They tried that?”

  She pointed at the fleshy, stringy gob of pink and red on the floor by my foot. “They both did.”

  That explained the blood coating their chins, and the splattered puddle of it by each chair. The upright one stared at me when I approached, eyes empty. Dead men sitting. I bent to study the sheen on his face, the ashy pallor at the edges.

  One eye flickered. A twitch of an eyelid.

  I patted him on the head. “I’m not exactly a fan,” I said to them, “but I’m fuckingly impressed with MetaCunt scouts right now.”

  Neither seemed to care what I thought.

  “Hey, Indigo?”

  He heard it in my voice. “Don’t you dare,” he warned. “We talked about this–”

  “I know, I know.” I really didn’t have any more time. Touchy feely feelings aside, Indigo had said it himself. All he needed was data from their chipsets. “You’ll have to ask your questions from Kern.”

  The Valiant slid off my shoulder. I caught it easily in my mending hand. Part SMG and part assault rifle, the baby could crunch out caseless rounds at an ungodly rate. Without the heat-baffled silencer attached, the number of rounds it could handle dropped some, but it wouldn’t matter here.

  There wasn’t much left of the first enforcer’s chest when I laid off the trigger. Blood and lung matter splattered everywhere, clung in thick gobbets to his buddy – who was visibly shaking. Face gone waxy pale, he stared pleadingly at Muerte’s corner, lips trembling around a clenched jaw. “Please,” he rasped.

  My finger did love that trigger. He jerked back, chest splattering. Maybe a little too much. I let go, lowered the nozzle. Silence finally descended. Everyone stared at me. Including the dead guys, eyes wide open and mouths slack.

  When Muerte’s quivering lips turned into a laugh she couldn’t suppress, Indigo lost it. “For fuck’s sake, Riko, what the hell?” He strode past, shoving me out of the way.

  “What?” I lowered the Valiant, tucked its warm metal behind my legs. “You said give them a shot.”

  Muerte’s laugh went so high pitched, it cracked in and out through her broken voicebox. She laughed like her neck would snap, sagging back into the corner and pounding the wall with both fists as she howled.

  The back of Indigo’s neck went bloodred with anger. I’d never noticed before. Skin drawn tight at jaw and cheekbones, he rounded on me, finger dead to rights to my chest. That stung a little.

  I deserved it. But not sorry; it was so incredibly cathartic.

  “You better hope,” he seethed, “I can extract something – anything – from their chipsets!”

  Smiling, I spread my arms wide. “That’s why I shot them in the chest.”

  I didn’t think I could drive him any further into rage. It was all he could do to clench his fists and press them to either side of his head in pure wordless frustration.

  Somehow, for some unfuckingknown reason I couldn’t place, that ugly thing under my chest eased. A little. Just a little.

  When he finally threw his hands up in the air, it was to growl, “Out. Go do something else. I’ll be in touch with anything I find.” His eyes narrowed to electric slits. “Assuming I find anything left.” Then he growled something I suspected I’d be better off not hearing.

  Better to leave before I pushed him any further than I already had. He knew me. Knew what it meant to bring me back on.

  I just made the obvious choice a lot easier to make when it was the only one left.

  Questions are good and all. The human angle often catches things raw data can miss, puts things together with instinct where even the most advanced tech still uses logic-based processors.

  But humans lie, too. Or misremember.

  If there was anything in their chipsets to find, Indigo’d find it. Better I gave him the time to do it alone. I left without further words. Not much to say after that kind of exit, anyway.

  Muerte caught me one floor down. “Hey, chica, rocking the boxers.”

  “Go suck a necro,” I said without stopping.

  “Ease up, I’m on your side.” She caught up fast, bent to consider my face. “That was funny as shit. Why so glum?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know why. I’d gone from constant anxiety to cutting hysteria to warm and fuzzies and then walked out here feeling low as fuck. I didn’t like the niggling little worm of an idea chewing on my brainmeat.

  I’d stared into the faceplate of a MetaCunt op calling in for two targets, and it was my forehead in his sights. Locking me down while he called for backup? I was the most obvious threat, I guess. Maybe he’d tagged two more, and was just making sure I stayed off his back?

  Didn’t feel right. If I was just some saint in his way, he’d have blown me away right there. The obvious linkup between myself and Indigo, given our mutual run for Mantis a few weeks ago, made me wonder.

  How had they found him?

  How did they know I’d arrive to help?

  Shit. “What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  I sighed, knuckled at my aching eyes. Not nearly enough time for everything to stop hurting. “You think my shack’s still safe?”

  “Probably. At least for a little while.”

  “Great. I’m going,” I lied, scanning the streets, “to go get some rest.”

  Muerte put a hand on my shoulder. “You still need to see a doc…” she began, but I shrugged it off. She frowned. Then resignedly shook her head. “Ai, Riqa. Your call. I’ll go poke some fingers into some holes, see what crawls out.”

  Good. Information would help. Getting well away from me while I knelt to suck corporate dick was even better.
r />   “Cheket,” she said, backing away. “Don’t get dead.”

  “Yeah, catch you,” I muttered, and stomped away. Fast away. From Indigo’s fragile trust and his habit of doubting my every move and his ability to see so deep under my skin that I felt like I needed a cigarette after it. Muerte’s stare and her constant laughter. Tashi’s uncomfortable solidarity.

  I stomped away wearing boxers and a T-shirt and big, black boots and I still wasn’t the weirdest motherfucker in the crowd.

  I would be when I got where I was going, though. Malik’s med-lab and Orchard’s kindness were all I could get. All for the low, low price of hyperventilation and a nosy doc hellbent on my wellbeing.

  Which was rapidly thinning out to stressed as fuck.

  Having Indigo stuck to my ass gave me a sense of relief I felt like a tangible weapon at my side, but until we made some progress, I needed more than a calibration. I needed edges I didn’t fucking have. It was long past time to roll the dice.

  I flagged down an automated taxi, palmed the dash as a computerized voice welcomed me into the vehicle. My netware hooked up to the signal, ran a quick datascroll through my optics and hacked the console. Fed the meter enough to get me wherever I wanted to go. Hacked the map, too. Basic stuff. The software did all the real work.

  Once the taxi lifted off, I leaned back in the scuffed plastic seat and closed my eyes.

  Goddamn, I was tired. All I wanted to do now was get my cunting chipset fixed. Another fight. Another shitting showdown. Malik Reed would not like my presence in his offices. Not after last time. Hope would probably try to get in my way – would she be there this early? I had no idea. I figured all suits either slept at their desks or came in bright and early for that go get ’em day.

  Either way, I’d find out. And if I was lucky, I wouldn’t have to fight anyone to do it.

  32

  The way I figured, long as that automated elevator of theirs continued to let me up, Malik Reed could choke on my ladycock. Place like Mantis had all kinds of ways to keep out punks like me. So far, it hadn’t locked me out yet.