Virology

by Ren Warom

  Where would a dead lock be transmitted from? Amiga asks Deuce, hunkered down behind a desk across from three soldiers and a screaming Corp Exec she really, really wants to shoot. It’s one bullet. If only one weren’t a fifth of her total ammo.

  Basement. You’re looking for a grey box. Do whatever you like to it, just make sure it’s broke.

  Smashing shit up? That she can do.

  The route to the basement is an exercise is destruction, mainly thanks to Aggie, who appears to be addicted to blowing things up. Everywhere they go they leave shards of plastic desks and chairs, the smashed remains of tablets and glass screens, and more dead bodies than they’d like, considering they’re trying not to hit Execs. Outside, the gendarme amuse themselves with hostage negotiation teams, as if that’s what’s going on. The story they’ll use to cover killing every Hornet in the building is doubtless already all over Parisian streams.

  “We’re never getting out of here.” Sim. Shouting over gunfire and loudspeakers.

  “Not by the front door.”

  “Quit with the cheerful tone,” Sim snaps. “I’m not digging the thought of imminent death. I feel like we’re trying to outrun something that doesn’t want to be outrun. First the farm, then the hangar, then this. Fate has it in for us.”

  “Then it can take a number and get in fucking line,” Amiga rips back, swearing to herself upon the fucking universe that if they manage to get out of this particular epic clusterfuck she’s never coming back to Paris. A twofer on near-death experiences is enough of a sign that the city of love is out to get her. Talk about your psychotic exes.

  They barrel into the basement in one big, clumsy group, the last Hornets in barricading the door with anything they can lay hands on. Raid finds the grey box first and goes hell for goddamn leather, kicking and yanking and yelling until it lies on the floor in a mangled mess. Minutes later, Deuce IMs them all, sounding grim.

  Main HQ is indeed Tokyo. I’ve IM’d Viv. They’ve got a ’scraper there, VA’d to the rafters and full of troops. I’d be half inclined to go help her if our situation here weren’t quite so tense.

  Tense? That’s what you call it? Sim’s all but spitting.

  Cool it, Sim. Right. I can’t touch their Tokyo systems, but I’ve scrubbed the drive here and crippled their remote servers. No one’s getting money out of the Cartel here. That should drop some of the heat.

  What about the gendarme? Amiga’s always more concerned about official heat. It has a habit of being both tenacious and dangerously stupid in equal measure.

  Very not good. Deuce shares footage from outside. The intersection is cordoned off and crawling with gendarme and Techs, whole teams of them, working on getting in to the jammed doors. They’ve amassed quite the crowd of the morbidly curious too. All routes out are locked in.

  What do we do? Amiga asks.

  Only one thing to do, he replies.

  If your next words are “go down shooting” I’m going to get back to the shuttle one way or another and beat your arse black and blue.

  He laughs. That’s quite the motivation to live then, hmm? Actually, I had a better idea. I suggest you go down.

  What now? Colour her officially confused.

  The catacombs, Amiga. They run right under your feet, and the gendarme won’t expect you to use them.

  Er, why?

  Because you’d have to be fucking suicidal.

  Fair enough.

  He throws a map into her head, the catacombs with the city transposed on top, their location flashing blue, the shuttle flashing red. Bring yourself on home.

  She bites back a smile. Did I tell you I love you?

  Nowhere near as many times as I like hearing it.

  Well consider yourself told. Only one thing…

  What?

  How the hell do we dig through solid concrete?

  Aggie steps forward at that. “We don’t dig,” she says, holding up her backpack. “Meet my friends, guanidine nitrate and powdered antimony.”

  “You wanna blow a hole in the fucking floor?” Amiga half squeaks. “And you call me crazy!”

  “The most we’ll get on us is dust,” Aggie says, looking entirely more confident than Amiga feels. “And let’s face it, considering the state of us, dust will probably be a sartorial improvement.”

  Aunty Dong Disappointed

  Hu Hai sucks on a beer, dispirited, trying to excise from his mind the image of over a hundred soldiers dropping in place, but it will not scrub clean. What is that Haunt?

  What will he say to Dong?

  Failure slides around in his belly slick and sour as unwashed fish innards, clinging like octopus legs to the throat when you swallow. All the worse for it not being his failure. He wanted to go in quiet, sneak up the sides of the farm and tear them from their beds. Mobster shit. Old school. Not good enough for Dong.

  The second she heard it was her niece and nephew’s farm the Haunt and his buds were using as a hidey-hole, she damn near lost her goddamn mind, shouting in thick, snarling Cantonese at speeds too fast to translate. She sent an army and insisted he use it, promoting him from puppet to general. Refused to hear anything he said about how the Hornets would click to that in a second and run. He’d seen it from her taps on the Cartel. Those Hornets are smart and scared, a combination that makes for super hard to catch.

  But there it was; Dong was furious and determined and he had no authority to refuse, being nothing but her faithful servant, her idiot numero uno, her cranial carry-bag, and in a few minutes time when she wakes up—her punching bag.

  No way she’ll accept that they underestimated the Haunt. No way.

  She’s going to kill him.

  He drains his beer. Tips the base toward the bar tender. “Another.”

  The tender grimaces. “You sure? That shit’ll have you throwing up your stomach lining. The actual lining.”

  “Look, pal, not long from now I won’t be in need of a stomach lining, or a stomach, or a fucking torso to keep them in, so I could give a rat’s arse about what this beer might do.” He slaps his cred chip on the bar, leans over it a touch. “Now fetch me another and keep them coming until this runs out or I drop dead. Okay?”

  The bar tender salutes with one finger. “Your flim, your choice.”

  “Damn right it is.”

  Hu Hai takes the fresh beer and downs half in one go. It tastes worse than licking filthy linoleum, but it’s ten minutes to Dong’s usual drop time and he wants to lay a solid wall of inebriation before he stands up for himself. He’s only going to do it once, he’ll be too dead to do it ever again, so he’s damn well gonna make it good.

  * * *

  Clawing his way along the street, hand over hand on crumbling concrete, Hu Hai can’t tell what pounds worst, his head, his heart, or the not so quiet beat of rage working like a pulse throughout his entire body. That bitch. That bitch. That scheming, murderous, no-good, underhanded, self-satisfied crone. He should have seen this coming. She’s vicious that Dong. Should have known she’d take revenge first. And how swift it was. She took a carving knife to his world and tore it to pieces.

  Divorced. Evicted. Fired. His wife. His life. His everything. All gone.

  And Dong has promised to share his shame in every corner, to light them up with news of his disgrace like hubs lighting the darkness. He’ll never work again. He’s done in this shit hole and every other. But oh, it’s his fault of course—she’s taken no blame. As if he’s the one who chose to rush in like a fool, dragging an army. As if he’s the one who looked at the Haunt and what he’d done and couldn’t see past the skinny body and daft dyed hair. As if it’s his doing.

  Hers. All hers.

  He belches, a sour mouthful of stale beer fumes and bile burning in his throat. Heaves, a torrent of foul-smelling beer splashing the sidewalk, his shoes. Puking hurts. Feels like it’s tearing his ribcage apart. He hates her. Hates. He wants her to lose as hard as he has. To lose everything. He wants to stand laughing as that old bitch f
alls and fails and sees it all tumble through her fingers.

  He stands, clutching at the wall, clutching at his belly. His head’s too fuzzy to think. He needs to sleep. To eat. To fucking shower. His feet turn toward the mono that will take him home, and falter. What home has he got? The rent’s paid till the end of the month and the freezer’s full of frozen dumplings but what then?

  Wiping his mouth, his chin, he tries to formulate an idea of life without work, without wife, with nothing but a pall of black shame he did not earn, and finds a wide open space, barren and dull, and here he thought his life small and mean to begin with. He had no idea.

  Too angry to allow tears, Hu Hai wipes his eyes, smearing the vomit on his sleeve across them, a foul-smelling slick, and something inside him cracks, breaks apart, the humiliation of his own puke in his eyes snapping him on some fundamental level. A place even Dong’s viscid humiliation failed to reach.

  “Can’t let the old bitch win,” he mutters to himself, in a peculiar place where he realizes he’s not right, that he’s gone wonky somehow and yet unable to stop, or to want to stop. “Can’t just roll over. Not a fucking puppy. Nope. Was a puppy but I’m not now. Fucking bitch. Not right. It’s not damned well right.”

  Listing slightly, he turns back the way he came. He’s going to go to Hong Kong. Meet Aunty Dong in person. Rip out her throat. Stretch her vocal chords between his fingers and pluck her funeral dirge on them with his teeth. The mere thought sets him to full-bodied chuckles as he makes his way back to the hangar, all too aware that at this moment, Hu Hai Tan is the living, breathing definition of balls-to-the-wall insane.

  And he doesn’t give a shit.

  Tokyo Drift

  Vivid and her team have been in Tokyo for less than six hours and they’ve already got survival locked down. Basic tenets of not dying? When you’re the treasure under the x mark, or the target caught in this many crosshairs, the single best way to avoid dying is to run like hell and hide. Bright, loud and lively as it is, Tokyo was made for hiding.

  Amongst its wide boulevards, blazing with multicolour signs, street lights and the headlights of hundreds of hover cars are markets so dense, the only way to find anything in them is to know its precise location; streets so twisty and secretive that to enter them is like walking into another world, a parallel universe, and disappearing; towers so densely packed you can use their mirrored windows like a fairground attraction.

  Considering their leet hiding skills, the only way her team has managed to keep tabs on one another is by constant IM connection, a network of Hornet activity held like golden threads between them, a spider’s web of hide and go seek. If only their pursuers could see it, but the Hornets hold the advantage, having arrived first and waited.

  Another basic tenet of not dying? Planning.

  Despite being inherently fierce, Vivid isn’t like Amiga, who likes to jump in solo and get shit done. Vivid plans. Works with her team. For Viv, it’s all about the slow pursuit and corner. Nothing flashy. Vivid had her team run and hide then wait and watch, marking every new entry into the hub, until the party arrived—seven shuttles filled with soldiers who got in with surprising ease and spread out to hunt them down like animals on the streets of Tokyo.

  But if the Hornets are animals, they’re not the low-down-on-the-food-chain kind. Not the ones who hide because they’d otherwise get eaten. They’re the sneaky, disadvantaged predators who know the best way to kill is to creep up from behind in the dark, and pounce. Blessed with more than a few of the Hornets’ top ten percent Techs, Vivid set them to marking each and every one of the soldiers after them. Shiny dots on a map. Red for Cartel, as in “don’t hunt yet, we need these bastards” and green for the ones who hit Shandong. Targets about to go the fuck down.

  Crouched on a bright-pink sign advertising soy sauce, Vivid watches the streets below through a pair of powerful binoculars cobbled together by Sandro, equipment genius extraordinaire, ex-low-level accountant gone full time J-Hack Code Monkey, and her current favourite Hornet. Part-time with the Hornets for three years, he quit his shitty job cold turkey the day the drones came, shucking off WAMOS status like badly fitting clothes and jumping into FT J-Hack life like he was made for it.

  Looking like a panther in skin-tight black leather, Sandro’s coiled below her on the ledge of the building, his skin glazed with pink glow, an identical pair of nox glued to his eyes.

  “See anything?” he asks, sounding annoyed, a little bored. “If they’re defo coming this way, why is it we’ve litch been perched here for an hour and no joy? Are they in that market buying every piece of sparkly tat in sight or what?”

  “My guess would be what. They’re doing what we’d have to if we weren’t way ahead of them—careful, coordinated sweeps, trying to keep out of sight so they don’t get clocked.”

  “It’s not like I’m gagging for action or anything here,” he says, then tilts his head and looks almost mischievous. “Although I am. My calves though. My thighs. Not the most fun I’ve ever had in Tokyo.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Vivid’s immediately envious; she had no idea Sandro was so well travelled. Before the fall of Fulcrum she would have sworn blind that the most exciting thing he did was his extra-curricular activity with the Hornets. It’s disturbing to find how little she knew him—how little she tried to know him.

  His brow shoots up. “Are you kidding? I used to be WAMOS, yeah? Tokyo’s the closest thing we have to a neighbouring country, the amount it orbits overhead. WAMOS treat it accordingly. Company business, family vacays, stag weekends. You name it, I’ve come to Tokyo for it.”

  “The love hotels?”

  He bites his lip, trying to chew away a smile. “Maybe.”

  “If love hotels could talk…”

  “Mine would make a fortune. You ever been to the ones on the Gung?”

  “My uncle ran one.”

  Before he can make anything of that tidbit, Vivid jumps lightly over the edge of the sign and slides down the metal scaffold support, chips of rust flaking off as she clings with the strong fingers of her right hand. Teetering down to hover nearer Sandro, Vivid nudges his nox a touch northward.

  “There.”

  The edge of the market opposite, a clean spread of bannered stalls selling wares stacked neatly and peppered with signs in precise kanji, proliferates with people out to buy food and essentials. Just inside, milling amongst the crowds, damn near impossible to spot without the accompanying green lights flashing from their J-Net GPS, are the unit they’ve been tracking, moving in pairs to avoid drawing attention to themselves. This unit has ten soldiers to her five, but they have no idea they’re exposed. Being outnumbered was never so much fun.

  “Well hello, action,” Sandro murmurs. He looks up at Vivid. “We out?”

  “Oh shit yes we are, covert and sly. We want to pick pairs off one by one, keep them disorientated.”

  Coiling up, Vivid springs back to the top of the sign. She wobbles there for a second or two, laughing breathlessly, then jumps lightly down on to the scaffolding at the back, running to catch Sandro, who took the easier route. Positioned out on another roof are Hallie and Jax, and in the market, all on his lonesome and currently rocking a hideous yellow jacket that should mark his position like a foghorn but somehow repels people from even looking at him is KJ.

  KJ, she says, without chiming. Time to throw some voices.

  She drops the positions of the soldiers into his drive, with helpful directional arrows, which he remakes into middle fingers. KJ may not be a fighter, but he knows what he’s doing. It’s not strictly throwing actual voices; it’s more like digital stone throwing, luring the soldiers into the narrow back streets, and he’s genius at it. He works fast, separating the soldiers and sending a pair toward Hallie and Jax and a pair in their direction.

  She signals to Sandro to climb down so they can move through the street on the tops of the signs.

  Perched high enough to watch the street for their targets but not
be seen by them, and low enough to jump without breaking shit, they wait until the two soldiers appear, stalking side by side, the spectre-green of their goggles visible in the relative darkness. Hello, extra green dots. As they cross beneath, Vivid and Sandro drop. The impact knocks the air from Vivid’s lungs but she’s braced for that. Prepared. Her target isn’t.

  In the seconds before her knife slips under his helmet strap and slices a clean cut from ear to ear, her target manages to half pull his gun, firing a shot through his own foot. The irony is beautiful. Beside them, Sandro’s had his knife knocked away. He’s wrestling his target, muscles bulging. Getting a leg behind theirs, he trips them up, slamming them down on to their front. Sliding to one side, he rams a knee into the elbow of the gun arm, drawing a muffled cry of pain.

  Grabbing the barrel he tears the gun away, breaking bones, pulling more of those muffled cries, higher pitched this time. Their struggle intensifies, the soldier’s body writhing to push up, to throw Sandro off. Breathing heavily, he rears up, dropping all his weight on their lower back and fires two clean shots, head and heart. The soldier stops moving.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “Bruised. Embarrassed. Grazed. But alive. You?”

  “Ready for another round.”

  As if he was listening in, KJ IMs, Ready for the next pair?

  He sends an image of them. They’re scary close. Vivid jerks her head at the loading bay nearby. The bins stuck in the corner.

  Let’s take out the trash.

  * * *

  It’s late when they call it a day, well past midnight. Tokyo’s lit up around them in all its glory, the streets crowded; nightclubs and karaoke bars all open for business and busy as hell. They meet up in a twenty-four-hour café to drink hot bubble tea, eat bowls of spicy beef ramen and discuss strategy. Most of them want to fucking strategize a good night’s sleep, but they can’t hit the pod hotels until they’ve figured a few things out.

  Vivid slurps up some noodles. “How many units do we have to kill tomorrow before we can start Cartel HQ hunting?”