by Lee Bond
To alleviate boredom, Chad occasionally shot one of them, marking down a number from one to ten on the dirt-encrusted fuel tank of his bike. It was his misfortune that most of the zombies that night were on their way to total mindblank; the fuckers just stood there, heads cocked to one side as they tried to figure out where the sounds were coming from. Not one of them offered up a tough shot, making his score abysmally low. If things didn’t start looking up, he’d need to move to another location and start the count over.
He hated starting over, he really did.
The screen was relaying a live video feed from the dance club. Earlier in the day, Chad had gone in under the pretense of wanting to kill everyone with the misfortune of possessing eyes. After they’d fled in panicky droves, he’d taken the time to place a few choicely located cameras so he could catch the gleaming, sweating faces of bastards who liked to look but not touch.
Chad figured anyone who’d pay to look at a naked woman but not to touch had something seriously wrong with them and deserved to die. If he’d found out about this place before being hired to do someone in, he might’ve swung by during downtime to rattle the cages.
Chad perked up when one Santos Grillo-Basque, aka The Job, sat down at one of the empty tables, grinning nervously and licking his upper lip every three seconds. It was about fucking time. Chad didn’t like perverts, and he absolutely hated perverts who didn’t stick to a tight schedule. He lit a cigarette –one hundred fourteen- with the glowing cherry of the old one and shot the butt across the parking lot. It arced perfectly, beaning a zombie in the back of the neck. The hollow man batted at the back of his head then turned around just in time to get a flechette dart in the eye.
Chad hawked a gob of spit onto the sidewalk, peering at the contents when the ferrocrete started sizzling. He was going to have to switch drugs again, which was a considerable pain in the arse. He’d built up such a tolerance to Quadra-19 that he was now taking lethal amounts to get high, and he was pretty sure the poisonous crap he fed into his veins was eating away at his cyborg innards. Still, it was either up the intake, switch the drug or … or run the risk of having to listen. Unaware that he shivered, Chadsik reminded himself he was On the Job.
Santos grinned feverishly at the fleshy delights parading back and forth on the screen, and Chadsik shivered again, repulsed. The assassin knew he was many things –completely, barking mad and on his way to being eternally toxic - but sexual deviance was something he just couldn’t get on board with. Unless it was for his Art, in which case, all bets were off. Torturing yourself for no apparent reason was just … mad.
“CHADSIK-AL-TARYIN!” The magnified voice boomed throughout the enclosure, startling the drugged out zombies into fleeing like a flock of frightened birds and pissing the assassin off.
Chad craned his head upwards to see who’d blown his cover. Moving slowly down one of the few air passages connecting Ground Zero to the bright and shiny world of Zanzibar Above was a Conglomerate hovercar. Not an unusual appearance in this neck of Ground Zero -not given the sort of merchandise available- but shouting a chap’s name while he was working just wasn’t done. It was downright rude.
He fished around in a saddlebag, pulled out a small rocket launcher and sent a few rounds upwards. He cursed when the pilot deployed a large amount of chaff, nullifying the idiot sensors on the rockets; the jet-propelled explosives spiraled out of control and slammed into a building three blocks away. There was a pretty explosion and Chad imagined he heard people screaming like burning ants.
“Wot I’d like to know,” Chadsik demanded loudly as he flipped a switch on his bike, “is wot the bloody fuckin’ ‘ell is goin’ on. Fella’s On the Job, ‘e ought to be left alone. It’s not too fucking much to ask, is it?”
The hovercar descended another ten meters before exploding in a brilliant red ball of fire. The pilot might have been smart enough to deactivate or jam all the other explosives running up and down the air channel, but nothing in the world could stop a few hundred pounds of thick gelsplosive and archaic radio transmitters. Chadsik prided himself on being thorough, and when he was On the Job, he covered all the bases; it wasn’t the first time a rival or an overeager customer had attempted to blow his current job, and it wouldn’t be the last.
As the smoke cleared and the debris clattered noisily to the ground, a second hovercar lowered itself further.
“Come on, mate.” Chad muttered plaintively around his cigarette. “That just is not fair, it isn’t. Bloody ‘ell.” He hadn’t thought to pack anything more destructive than the rocket launcher, and he’d literally shot his wad with the gelsplosive. The assassin grimaced. He was going to have to wait and see what was going to happen next. It was a grim reality that his commission for killing Santos was right out the fucking window, too. Everyone in the known goddamn Universe was talking a look-see.
The bottom of the hovercar resolved itself into a very large video screen depicting Spur’s albino EuroJapanese face.
“Oy, I know you.” Chad shouted upwards at android’s face, squinting against the glare of the lights. “You’re that robot wot’s bin stuck away in the mighty effing Jordan effing Bishop’s giant turd of a building.”
“Chadsik-al-Taryin?” Spur’s lip curled against his will. Some people were so rank, so vile, that even he, an artificial intelligence, could not contain his disgust. The man was a canker.
Chad exhaled a noisy plume of smoke. “’s me, you great bloody robotic wanker.”
Spur hesitated. Chadsik-al-Taryin was a far different animal in person than on paper. Hiring him could put Jordan in a difficult position. Reading over the man’s insanity read like a playbook of psychiatric maladies that one might encounter over a career, not housed in a single, maddened cyborg. Reports concerning the cause of the maladies were too implausible to consider true, and yet … staring at the readouts, Spur conceded that only one percent of the idiosyncratic FrancoBrit’s implants were recognizable as implants. Discerning what they did was impossible. It was impossible to believe the man had been abducted by Offworlders of any kind, not within the core system, but those implants … nothing had been seen before or since. The question was: did the implants make him mad, or had he been that way all along?
The android wondered why Trinity allowed something like Chadsik-al-Taryin to exist when he so clearly violated hundreds of Laws.
“Oy,” Chad shouted, “if you just dropped in to ‘ave a bit of a gander at me an’ my ‘andsome face, ‘ow’s about you fuck off and let a fella get back to work?”
Spur made a decision. Other than a clearly insane pathology, Chadsik was one of few assassins who would do as promised without bragging; he trusted his panache with killing to do word of mouth advertisement for him, and he’d never once failed. “There is something I need done.”
“Would this be a Job Opportunity?” Chad smiled lazily. The second wave of Quadra was kicking in and the world was taking on a decidedly hazy, multicolored fringe. Any voices he might’ve heard murmuring in the dark abscess of his mind shut itself right up. “For you or for The Man?” he asked when the android nodded tersely.
“Jordan Bishop.”
“Ain’t you worried about all these people askin’ questions or sellin’ your boss out?” Chad asked, waggling his hands at the drug zombies and the small crowd outside the dance club. He grinned toothily at Spur’s expression, and howled in laughter when the hovercar flipped over to reveal a battleship’s worth of rockets and laser cannons. The pilot of the vessel took great pains in demolishing everything and everyone in a one-block radius, leveling everything taller than a very small dog into charred ashes. “Oy! My target was in there. Fucking hell, mate. That’s a strike against me good name, right?”
The hovercar flipped over again to reveal Spur’s haughty countenance. “If you had answered my call, Chadsik-al-Taryin, none of this would have taken place.”
“I do not answer my phone when I am On the Job.” Chad replied arrogantly. He surveyed the damage wi
th a professional’s eye and shrugged. Total effing washout, like he’d thought. “But seein’ as ‘ow I find myself temporarily in need of work, let’s us ‘ave a chit-chat. Only,” he said dubiously, “someplace a little quieter, yeah? All this moanin’ an’ wailin’ is getting on my robotic tits.”
The Lady Ha’s Ministrations Prove Themselves
Located in the heart of Central City, The Palazzo Grande was unmistakably a five star luxury hotel the rich and powerful wanted to stay in; from every room, guests could behold the stark, forbidding cluster of skyscrapers that was the seat of power in Latelyspace. No doubt, movers and shakers in Latelian society who came to visit the homeworld enjoyed the feeling of might and power that came from being able to look down on the Chairwoman and the other politicians.
Garth, on the other hand, found the sight equally depressing and irritating, because that same bizarrely patriotic skyline reminded him of how well and sincerely screwed in the ass he was.
He’d accepted the OverSecretary’s overtures at the time because his options had been, well, ‘limited’ was a place to start. Doing so had kept him alive long enough to get citizenship. That alone was a gift worthy of being screwed; he now had opportunities to lay down long-term plans should it become necessary, up to and including joining the God Army.
In his haste to secure the cherry of citizenship –not to mention not dying in a random mega-politician’s overly dictatorly offices- he’d been perfectly blindsided by game-changing rules; as a citizen, it was against the law for him to beat on Offworlders. He was now expected to play Punch Face with God soldiers.
It might not happen right away, but again, options were limited. By signing up for The Game, he was now contractually and legally obligated seven hundred thousand and one ways from Sunday to actually participate! If he didn’t want to make his life even more miserably complicated by opting out, if he planned on not dying in the ring, then yes, it was absolutely expected that he wrassle with a God Soldier. His only hope rest in –if he could avoid becoming fiercely competitive- letting his ass get beat without being beat senseless.
Failure wasn’t an option he could live with, though, so when he looked out across the skyscraper-dotted skyline, he felt depressed. There was every reason to be, because every single one of the paranoid, prote-crazy mega-mongloid bastards was going to hate him if he succeeded.
The only thing keeping Garth from losing his mind were steadfast prayers that the ‘mechanism’ making him stronger and faster would keep on keeping on. It was unrealistic to hope he’d wake up as augmented as a God soldier, but any advances made between now and then would be greatly appreciated.
Sadly, there wasn’t anything he could do about his mood; he was the source of his ire. The overpowering urgency driving him had obliterated all sense of caution. He’d jumped into this society with both feet before thinking, and now he was well and truly fucked. Ignoring Terrance’s Machiavellian schemes to rid the system of Chairwoman Doans and her pro-Trinity agenda, there was still an army of angry Portsiders out there. There had to be some reason those bastards were after him, but try as he might, he kept drawing a blank. The prevailing theory was that he’d done something to piss them off. He pissed people off by breathing, for crap’s sake. Trying to figure out who and how would be like looking for a needle in a mountain of needles.
Besides his growing paranoia and mounting irritation and unrealistic hopes, everything was awesome.
Garth lay on the massage table as Si Georgia -a lithely gorgeous IndoRussian/Latelian woman- worked the kinks out of his back, and thought about the pros of his current incarnation. Today, he was filthy stinking rich. Tomorrow he’d have more money than the entire Latelian system. Ridiculous amounts of cashola would grease a lot of wheels and smooth a lot of bumps.
No longer rigged to explode at the whimsy of some mercurial asshole, his proteus was now almost fully unlocked, granting him access to all manner of illegal programs and data. That was a gift that would keep on giving. When he could spare the time, Garth was certain he’d remember who Lady Ha looked was; that would be a tick in the plus column because who in their right mind wouldn’t try to hire the system’s greatest programmer?
Last and most certainly not least, there was Huey; when and if the AI was from his prison, things would get even easier.
It was all about picking achievable goals.
Thinking about Huey prompted Garth to worry about the AI’s frame of mind; their last meeting had gone fine, except for a slight edge to Huey’s temperament. A few days trapped inside the sphere equaled a few thousand lifetimes to an AI, during which time any number of schizoid tendencies could erupt. Garth silently promised Huey he’d visit ASAP.
Si Georgia finished up. “Will there be anything else?”
The massage hadn’t come close to the one from the rub and tug house, but most of the kinks were gone, which was better than nothing. “Um, no thanks, Si Georgia.” Garth flashed a tip to the woman’s proteus. “That was more than enough.”
Georgia packed up her equipment, smiled her thanks at the generous tip, and left.
Garth pulled on a pair of loose pants he’d ordered from the on-site clothiers and headed into the bathroom; Georgia hadn’t commented on the bullet wounds, which had to mean he was almost, if not fully, healed.
Bothering him more than his escalated healing was the fact that the sniper rounds should have gone right through his body with superlative ease. Instead, though, he was fine. Why’d the bullets stop? He didn’t feel bulletproof or anything. That was the sort of thing a guy’d notice, right? He pinched his skin hard, grimacing at the pain. Okay, so his skin wasn’t armor-plated, meaning that his morphology was doing something whacky to the insides. Debating the merits of poking at his own insides with a sharp stick to test that theory, he shook his head; he was losing his effing mind.
Chiming with the now familiar sound of an incoming call, Garth hurried back into the main sitting area so his prote could toss the call onto a Screen. On the way there, he slid on one of his new black t-shirts, chuckling at the mental image of the uptight geezer who’d taken his order; the old codger had done everything in his power to keep his clearly insane Offworld customer from having ‘slogans’ put on them. In the end, both an obscene amount of money and Garth’s perpetually dynamic ability to persist against all odds forced Chauncy to give in. Walking around in shirts labeled ‘Foreign Devil’, ‘Subversive Element’ and ‘Citizen Pariah’ would piss some people off in the funny kind of way.
It was Jimmy. He read Garth’s shirt and laughed. “Calling yourself a Foreign Devil won’t make you any friends here, Garth.”
“Yeah, I know.” Garth smiled evilly. “But at least there’s no doubt this way.”
“The Palazzo Grande.” Jimmy admired the scenery behind Garth for a moment before continuing. “My brothers-in-law want to meet you tonight.”
It was about time. If the hatchet job he’d done on Huey’s personality matrix hadn’t driven the AI completely apeshit, Port authorities’ attempts at enforced suicide had or soon would; as near as Garth could tell, a rogue AI was bad for everyone. At the time of the hack, Garth had been completely ignorant on the anti-human sentiment rogue AI minds carried, and honestly, he was fairly sure it wouldn’t have mattered. He needed Huey and being saddled with a metal mind more interested in blowtorching people into ash than helping him out was unacceptable; saving Huey was paramount.
“Yeah?” Garth asked. “When?”
“Late tonight.”
“Night owls, eh?” Garth made a show of looking at his prote, working out the rest of his night. It was going to be tight, but he didn’t really have a choice; during the trip to the Palazzo, his buddy Robret had flashed him with the latest updates on what he was expected to do vis a vis the Game. He needed to meet with the stooges in order to get into the Port undetected, and he damn sure couldn’t miss a single Game fight right then, so he’d just have to figure out a way to make everything work. “I got my first elim
ination round at 7 early, so it’s gotta be a short meeting.”
“Oh?” Jimmy’s eyebrows rose of their own accord. After dropping Garth off, he’d planned on checking out his suspicions, but hadn’t been able to find the time; he’d spent the last few hours in the company of his sister’s brothers.
Garth grimaced. “Yeah. Citizenship changed things in a big way. Gotta fight my own ‘people’ now.”
“Uhm, well. I’ll call you about ten minutes before I get to the Hotel.” Jimmy ended the call quickly.
Garth played the conversation back with the volume muted so he could concentrate on Jimmy’s body language. There was little doubt that the cabbie was unhappy at dealing with his unsavory brothers-in-law. Garth was willing to bet his left nut Jimmy’s relatives were Portsiders, putting them both in a bad way; if he was right, the meeting was a trap.
There was little else to do but go with the flow. Getting onto the Port with Jimmy’s relatives wasn’t nearly as important as finding out how they got on. From there, it was a matter of subverting their technique. Simple.
Worse than that, though, was Jimmy’s state of mind. Learning that he was going to have to fight Latelians had sent the cabbie into a massive state of panic. There was something about his change in status …
“Ahhh, shit, Jimmy.” Garth hung his head. Jimmy was in a world of trouble. If these particular Portsiders were disinterested in killing, they had ulterior motives almost certainly centering on an Offworlder who could win. If they were Portsiders, they had to be aware of his kill ratio since hitting dirt. That’d be all the convincing guys who liked to bet would need.
All this was moot, though.
Garth didn’t need to read Bettor and Bettor contractual guidelines to know advance betting on the winner was a huge risk/huge payoff scenario that only idiots and crooks took. Arbiters on the case would treat relocation to different rosters the same as if he’d been kicked out of the competition. For them it was just a matter of making a change to the listings. For them as had bet, all that money was gone. No refunds, no arguments. Bettor and Bettor didn’t care.