Virology

by Ren Warom

  Before she can throw out a “what the hell”, Shock provides a physical demonstration, or rather a mental one, arcing into her drive and the drives around her like a current; jumping to the others through her. Her head fills up, static and gold and pain like a migraine and a fucking hammer blow rolled into one. Intense enough to white out her sight, to make her skin ripple pins and needles. She’s pretty sure she might be gagging.

  The sharp jab as the gold within pushes outward pops the pain like a bubble, leaving cold shudders reverberating through her entire system, rendering the sudden drop of the Zeros in the tunnel slightly less amazing than it otherwise might have been. She almost envies the impact of their faces on rock; it probably hurts less than this gold agony rippling through her skull that fades way too slowly after he’s gone, leaving entirely inadequate apologies in his wake.

  By the time she feels normal again, he’s over at Aggie, his hands inside her head. He looks up.

  I can’t do anything about this. Volk might be able to. I’ve shut her down until we can get her to the Resurrection. You okay?

  NO. Ass. That fucking hurt. Are they dead?

  He shakes his head. I diffused the strike through you guys. Sorry if it hurt; I need practice.

  You are never practicing on me again, she snaps. Vetoed. Amiga kneels to feel the pulse of the Zeros. It thuds against her fingers, a slow, thick rhythm.

  There’s a lot of blood and their skin, paper-thin and see-through, has split, bruising almost instantly; huge, black bruises like rot. If this virad infection doesn’t kill them, they’re gonna be feeling this shit for months. She sneaks a sideways glance at Shock. She’s done worse, way, way worse, but what he did? No fucker should be able to slice consciousness clean from a distance. Shouldn’t be able to kill like he did at the hangar.

  So, the hangar, and this. It’s… a thing, she says, cautious.

  Emblem thinks I can’t do it without killing unless I diffuse. He replies. I think I can.

  Turning to gape at him, she tries to clear her mental throat before responding, but the air is gone and even mind to mind it comes out as a wheezing, You think? Maybe you better be sure before you do shit then? Just in case?

  Shock gives her this delirious grin, the same goofy mouthful of teeth that endeared her to his dumb ass from day one. That’s the last thing I ever thought I’d hear you say, he says, humour laced all through it. I’m thinking we’ll need me to do this again before I know the how, why or intricacies of it. This is not exactly a time-to-learn sitch, much as I’d love for it to be.

  You might be right, she concedes reluctantly. I hate when you’re right.

  That’s your inner control freak speaking, comes his chewy reply. You’re going to have to carry Aggie out.

  No probs. That’s Raid, already organizing another Hornet to help him lift her.

  I’m going back to the shuttle. I need to tell Deuce I’m awake. You good to get out?

  Amiga points at Ebon, who’s staring at him like she doesn’t know whether to slap him or run, her fingers rubbing circles at her temples. We have a guide.

  I thought I felt an unfamiliar mind.

  You didn’t check?

  Shock quirks a brow. He’s one of those people who can make it extra scornful. I had time? I kinda thought saving your ass from the Zero zombies was a tad more pressing.

  And he’s gone, not peeling from the tunnel in golden layers, just gone. She misses him immediately. Misses the chance to really rake him over the coals for proving to be as much of a murderous bastard as she is. People should be predictable. Amiga recalls fondly for a moment the days, not so long ago, when she got to be the shit that happened to people—she genuinely despises being the people shit happens to.

  Moving at speeds too close to a run for Amiga’s thigh, Ebon leads them to another cave in the catacombs and points to a hole in the back.

  “That’s the way out.”

  “How the hell do we get Aggie up there?” Raid says, peering in, trying to light it with his tablet.

  “Pull,” Ebon says, as if it’s obvious.

  “Great,” he mutters. “Just great.”

  The hole is claustrophobically narrow. Almost vertical. It leads to a cold, rank basement no more cheerful or less filthy than the catacombs themselves. Above the basement is a grubby little Slip shop cum social club or bar filled to the brim with heavily armed members of the Parisian underworld. There’s a live band playing something folksy grunge, a line of ancient keno machines and arcade games, all chiming away, and a bunch of old pool tables in back. J-Hacks have peculiar obsessions.

  Amiga follows a nasty, sneaking suspicion to a hideous conclusion. “This is the Bone Market, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You’re safe here.”

  “You sure? I almost died last time I encountered the Bone Market.”

  Ebon treats her to the driest look known to mankind, the eyeballing equivalent of Giza Hub in high summer. “If you came here bringing the same sort of trouble you’ve conjured today,” she says. “I can’t say I blame them.”

  * * *

  Waking up to Ravi in his face is honestly becoming one of Shock’s recurring nightmares. Not that he dislikes Ravi; dude’s on point, but the reasons for Ravi being in his face are usually bad ones and he’s usually in an amount of pain not dissimilar to the metric weight of the actual Earth.

  This time, big surprise, is no exception. Whatever reverberations that mass slaughter he pulled off in the hangar caused in his mind are still rippling through it, carrying sharp glints of pain like metal shards burrowing in. Now he understands Amiga’s reluctance to have him practice on her. He reminds himself to apologize.

  Ravi leans back and yells over his shoulder, “He’s up.”

  “Quit talking about me like I’m not here, Ravi.”

  Peeling one of Shock’s eyelids back, Ravi leans in to scrutinize his eye. “Then call for Deuce yourself. IM. I dare you. Your frontal lobe may explode. Do it for science.”

  Shock bats Ravi’s hand away. “You already did.”

  There’s a clatter from behind Ravi, and Deuce appears, looking tired, concerned and more than a little stressed. He crouches by Shock’s side, wincing. Probably his legs are playing up. Fuck, they’re all rocking geriatric levels of pain and discomfort. What the fuck will be left of them when this is over? Having met Zen, Shock’s now no longer certain it ever will end, not if they have to kill her somehow to end it. If Mollie asked for this, he’s not certain he trusts Mollie any more.

  “You wanna talk about mass murder?”

  Deuce is quiet but the censure is right there, front and centre. It’s not fair. It’s not like Shock planned to kill—well, until he did, but that’s a discussion he needs to have with himself, maybe with Puss. And there were extenuating circumstances of rage and grief and general tilt on all the utter bullshit they keep encountering to factor in. Faced with the same choice now, he’d do it again. He’ll be damned if he’ll explain that or anything else to the boy scout though.

  “I just woke up.”

  “Don’t stonewall me, Haunt. I get enough of that from Amiga. We need to start some kind of list of these things you can do and, I’ll be real with you, a heads up on anything new you might have stumbled upon would save a lot of strife.” He offers Shock a hand and pulls him up. “Am I to assume your general lack of ability to share, rather than your usual bollocks, is because you have no idea how far all this can go?”

  “Basically. Oh and you’re welcome. Twice.”

  “Salty. And twice?”

  Drop Amiga in it or not? Definitely drop. Any diversion is a good diversion. “Amiga had some trouble.”

  A single muscle in Deuce’s jaw jumps. “She okay?”

  “Yeah. Aggie’s not. They got attacked by Zeros wielding weaponized virads. Or at least that’s what Emblem thinks they are from having a poke about in Aggie’s head. And before you ask: no. Fixing weaponized virads is not a thing I can do, not alone. Not god here, despite some evid
ence to the contrary. I’ll need Volk to have a look.” From the vaults of his mind, feeling less fried by the second, thank fuck, bubbles a memory, one intertwined in excruciating detail with the loss of Puss. “Also, I know where the avis were stolen from.”

  “Then that’s where we go.” Amiga. Coming into the hangar in so many layers of dust, blood and mud he might not have clocked it was her without the talking. “And we need to light a fuse on it. Your vehicular activity team got their mugshots on the gendarmerie’s arrest-on-sight poker deck.”

  “Actually we have another option.” Tracker, quiet and serious from the door of the cockpit.

  Rifling in the shuttle cabinets for things to clean a fraction of the filth accumulated on her and her team, Amiga snorts. “Better be a fucking good option. I’m itching to Clean the cunts who joy-rode my avi into a cage.”

  “I have the location of whoever called the hit on Shandong.”

  Amiga pauses, a bunch of cushion cases dangling in her hands. “Where?”

  “Hong Kong Hub.”

  Her hands seem to convulse, ripping the shit out of the cases. “Mother fucker.”

  “You know who that is?” Deuce asks, taking the cushion cases and handing them out along with bottles of water. He wets one and starts clearing the crud on Amiga’s face, one hand holding her chin steady, the other working in slow, methodical circles.

  Amiga looks at Shock, and the expression on her face is one he’d happily wipe off along with the mud and dust, such a peculiar combination of savagery and guilt. “So does he.”

  “I do?” Then he does, because Hong Kong isn’t just a place, it’s a goddamn mnemonic. Mother fucker. Now he knows why the farm got hit. His fault; all his stupid fucking fault. They should have gone elsewhere—there was no way she wasn’t going to find out and she’s all about revenge, that whole family has always been obsessed with it. He shakes his head. “We are not going, Amiga. I’m not going anywhere near that bitch. She probably wants to feed me to her plants. In chunks. Still kicking and screaming.”

  “Probably,” Amiga says with a shrug. “That gonna stop you though?”

  “Yes. A thousand fucking times yes!”

  “Not even for Gail?”

  As verbal shutdowns go, that one is the equivalent of a bucket of freezing water tossed over his head. Gail’s commitment to protecting the Hornets—who are more important to Shock than he’d ever admit—was absolute. Selfless. He took them in like family and treated them no less. If not for him, the weeks after the fall of Fulcrum would have been unbearable. He gave them stability. Safety. Risked everything for them before he even met them. And Shock cost him his home. His job. Maybe his life. He owes him. Is in fact indebted to him.

  Being far too fucking perceptive for her own good, Amiga is fully compos of this fact. He’d be irritated by this, except that from the look in her eyes he can tell she’s been here too, and feels the same. Her debt to Gail is identical to his.

  “Oh fuck you. Yes. Yes, I’d go for Gail.”

  “What about the avis?” Raid. “What about Aggie?”

  “Viv can go for the avis,” Deuce assures him. “You know she’ll be up for that. And we’ll get Aggie help the second we can. If we had time to go back down and hit up the Res you know we would, yeah?”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s just… the whole searching another hub again…” he trails off. Looks pained. “I’m fucking tired. We all are.”

  “No need to worry about that,” Shock says, before Deuce can speak. “I can pinpoint our target on Hong Kong. I know who she is.”

  “But you don’t have Puss.”

  Wow. That hurt. “I don’t need her for Slip,” he says, finally letting them know some of the crazy shit happening to him these days. “I’m kind of my own avi in there now.”

  “And out of there,” Amiga adds.

  Raid’s jaw drops. “That’s kind of not fucking normal, Shock.”

  “No shit,” Shock says, and feeling super dry, like he’s pointing out the fucking obvious here, he adds, “But then, I’m not, am I?”

  A Resignation By Proxy

  Yakuza don’t mess around.

  Working with them is like being swept up in a hurricane, a very fucking well-armed hurricane. And it howls to life in the daylight, with no attempt at subterfuge, a huge motorcade heading out at speed with katanas slung at their backs. Yakuza of Edo do everything in style. True fact: not a soul in this motorcade bar Vivid and her Hornet crew is dressed in anything but couture fashion. Literally every fucking Yakuza herein looks like a goddamn model. Vivid’s damn near aghast, but no one in the motorcade looks nervous apart from her and the Hornets. The single thing redeeming this going-in-guns-blazing crap is that the Hornets get to use the same guns, and being properly armed for the first time in forever ticks all Vivid’s boxes. Semi-autos? Yes please.

  She feels underdressed, overstressed and adequately armed—the dichotomies are giving her one hell of a headache.

  The Cartel HQ is equally classy, a shimmering rise of mirrored glass, tinted rose gold. Expecting the reception to be locked and loaded by now, Vivid’s stunned when they all troop in uncontested, or rather blast their way in with smart missiles—ho-lee cow. Umi has her men take the receptionists out to the cars and the rest goes down like a military operation, hundreds of Yakuza spreading out through the floors via both staircases and shoots, guns up and firing precision volleys.

  The most the Hornets can do is keep up as they take floor by floor.

  As an underground organization, as much of a bunch of pirates in their own way as the crew of the Resurrection City land ship, the Hornets aren’t accustomed to rolling in hardcore, brandishing weapons, and sweeping the opposition away like fucking flies. It’s something to witness, even more of a thing to be part of it, however minuscule. And they are minuscule, limited to taking pot shots at Cartel soldiers who somehow get past the whole battalions of Yakuza rampaging their building.

  Near the top floors, Vivid makes sure to be alongside Umi’s team. The welcome is not fulsome exactly but no one tells her to piss off, so she pulls Raid in with her as they hit the shoot to where duPont and his right hands might be holed up.

  “Leave this to us please,” Umi says.

  “So the invitation to join was more of an invitation to watch you in action?”

  “You thought it was an invitation to participate?”

  The sheer level of pity dropping on her would bury a lesser soul, but Vivid is nothing like lesser souls. She’s gone clubbing wearing scantier clothing than the average podium dancer, she might not have killed Twist Calhoun but she sure as shit beheaded him, and she’s always been first to throw a punch in a fight. Point of pride, that. She smiles, sweet as anything, taking this shit whilst fully planning to stick her oar so far into the hunting and killing of the Cartel top trio they need bowel surgery to have it removed.

  Biding time is an art, and in her line of work Vivid’s had ample opportunity to become the freaking Rembrandt of biding time; excruciating hours on counter-surveillance jobs, spying on one Corp for another; agonizing stints in Slip, chasing down elusive scraps of code and stalking cyber-operatives. Oh yeah, she’s a fucking pro all right. She raises a brow at Raid, also a pro. He nods. He’s in, of course he is.

  No way they aren’t taking their pound of flesh out of duPont. They’re due.

  The upper floors of the ’scraper are living quarters even better situated than Oniji’s semi-traditional penthouse and their Shandong digs, which gives Vivid more than a twinge—homesickness and grief and bone-melting rage. Two homes. They’ve been hounded out of two fucking homes now; granted the second had no more than a brief span of time to become theirs, but it was, just as much as Jong-Phu, the home the Queens destroyed. The next home they find, she’ll die before she lets anyone take it.

  Something smashes up ahead. Shots are fired and someone screams. Rage. Pure, unfettered rage.

  And a woman yells, “That was a fucking Ming, you animal!”

>   “My dearest Jess takes her interior design rather seriously,” drawls a silky voice, and it sounds damn near apologetic, which makes the agonized screams that follow all the more disturbing.

  All but sprinting in, they find the bodies of several Yakuza strewn about a minimalist lounge, their blood sprayed across buttery-white leather sofas and pooling into the cracks between pale floorboards. The amount of damage done in the time between the initial screams and their arrival in the room is eye-opening. Of the Cartel’s head trio, there’s no sign. Umi points to the shoot, ticking down floors.

  “Send word downstairs to detain them.”

  Whilst Yakuza gather the dead and shout orders, paying no attention to them, Vivid and Raid take their chance, sneaking back to the shoot to follow the trio wherever the hell they’re running to. The fact that they’re running at all is a surprise. Given their ability to carve up a room of Yakuza they might be expected to stay for more fun rather than turn tail.

  Ground level is all chaos. Somehow the Cartel’s head trio managed to shoot their way out of the reception and hightail it away, in their own car from the sound. It looks like half the Yakuza have gone after them, the others don’t seem to know what the fuck to make of this turn of events except get mad and shoot Cartel employees. Watching the Yakuza lose their damn minds amuses Vivid no end.

  “This is why they need Hornets. Maybe if they’d let us have a say they’d still have the upper hand here.”

  “It’s not like they don’t. I mean the place is licked, they just lost the ace cards is all.” Raid’s trying to be a diplomat.

  “What hand have you got if you lost the aces, Raid? A fucking dead one. They need to throw their cards in and let the pros take over. Cartel aren’t Yakuza. They have no honour. They need sneaky cunts like us to catch them.” Whilst she’s talking, she’s busy jacking into a bike. It roars to life. “Hop on. Let’s go hunting.”

  “We’re leaving sans the other Hornets?”

  “IM’d. They’ll find us easy, they’ll be following the same blazing arrow of Yakuza cars trashing pavements. Literally better than breadcrumbs.” Skewing the backend, she takes off, weaving between traffic, Raid whooping in back.