There was blood across the floor. Bones, too. It was always a gamble coming this way.
One dog approached him—a tall shaggy mastiff, ribs showing. Something twisted in Samson’s chest, seeing the clearly defined bones of the big dog, but he could do nothing about it. He didn’t even dare give the dog a name, as dogs died so often. But he knew the dog, and it clearly knew him.
He held out a treat. The mastiff barked at attention, pushing forward. Giving the mastiff the treat, Samson reached forward and scratched it under the ears. The little morsel was gone in a flash, swallowed without even being chewed.
Partner, following suit, tried to pet the dog as well. The mastiff yelped and then bit at Partner. Its teeth scrapped over the metal forearm, drool slobbering down. The dog seemed surprised even as it continued to clamp its jaw. Partner looked up at Samson and then back down at the dog, jaw open in a sort of crooked metal smile.
Samson took Partner’s free hand.
“Come on. There’s a ways to go yet.”
* * * * *
Victor found Oscar’s hideout in the middle of Junktown, as he was told he would.
He stood across the street from the small, sturdy-looking shack, which was reinforced with steel beams and windows made of bulletproof-glass. Every so often, sounds of shouting would spill out—indecipherable gibberish, the kind that a drug addict would yell out in a rage. Or, the kind of fearful polemic that someone would make a recording of to keep people away.
The sense he had of Oscar’s location—something buried in his head somewhere, letting him know in a distant way where Oscar and twenty-three others like him were—was strong but not exact. The intel he had was similar—inexact. Victor’s headquarters had a general idea of where to find Oscar—and so in this way were not much more useful than Victor’s own homing senses.
But Victor’s instincts told him that a normal shack in the middle of the town—buried beneath pillars and rows of other such shacks and apartment complexes—would not have steel support beams on its outside, nor bulletproof glass windows, nor complex tech made-up to look like decaying wood lining the doorway.
“I think I’ve got it working now. Hot damn! Victor, are you there?”
Victor pressed a hand to his ear. “Hello, Mike.”
He could talk without speaking, moving his vocal chords at very low frequencies. This was something trained, something bred, into Victor. One of many such capabilities.
Buried in his ear was a very small transmitter. It permitted Victor to communicate with his base, which orbited in the stratosphere around St. Louis. No doubt, Tri-American knew the Groove aerial fortress was there, just as Groove knew of all the Tri-American aerial fortresses around their own cities. It was a common business practice—a gentleman’s courtesy—to allow the fiction that all these fortresses were hidden. Victor always operated in a rival territory with the assumption that his presence was well-known to said rivals. Even so, it often didn’t matter. Corporate bureaucracy limited security officers from acting on rival corporate agents without quite a lot of paperwork.
Sometimes Tri-American didn’t even need to try to sabotage Victor’s missions. With so many corporate devices competing for wavelength in a given area—and with Victor an employee of Groove, chock-full of Groove technology—often his transmitter wouldn’t work on its own in a Tri-American zone. Luckily for Victor, he was mostly biological. Even the bits of him that weren’t living tissue were powered by his biology. Not much of his body relied on software or transmission.
But some, yes.
“You are right on top of that mothersucker, as far as we can tell. Good on you, son,” said Mike.
“I know.”
“Smart man! Nothing past you. Okay. Also, there's another thing I gotta tell you.”
“I already know about the data slabs. I’ll have them for you.”
Oscar had been spying on Tri-American for Groove, which meant he had a great deal of software and information about both corporations. In the world of bi-corporate dominance, selling out to the other side was a given. It was understood. It was downright encouraged. The higher-ups didn’t know how to trust someone who wasn’t bought off.
But Oscar had done something taboo—he started selling to a third party. Someone outside of Groove, outside of Tri-American.
That had to stop. And in the meanwhile, all the data he had mined from Tri-American from his time in St. Louis was still worth quite a lot.
“Good, good. But there's another thing.”
“Okay.”
“It's a doozy.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe you should sit down. Are you sitting down?”
“Tell me what it is.”
“Hot damn! Always on task. I like that about you, Victor. Okay, get on task with this: there's a quake coming.”
Victor almost stood up. It had been a long time since he had been surprised. “What?”
“An earthquake. Off the charts huge, goddamn! The whole San Madrid fault is sinking to hell and back. That city is going to be a disaster area.”
“You couldn’t have figured this out before you sent me down?”
“No, Mister Smarmy Pants, we could not have. That is why all eleven billion dollars of you is down there currently.”
Matter-of-fact Mike. Mike the Moderator. Middling Mike.
“The alarms are going to go off soon. Five minutes? Ten? Son, you don’t have a lot of time. We’ve tampered with the systems a bit. They should already be sounding, but we needed to give you more room to work. Hot damn,” Mike chuckled, “it is going to be a wild goddamn place down there. The alarms’ll cause a big rush of folks everywhere. Madness! Pandemonium. Slowing you down, what not, all of that. Explosions, I expect.”
“Right.”
“How many explosions you think? We're putting in an over-under. I can mark you down for fifty.”
“Don't bother.”
“All business! Goddammit, that's good. All right, son. Once those alarms go off, it’ll be too late. The quake’ll be here. Well, not here, thank god! Down there. With you. So, hurry.”
Less time for alarms meant less people evacuated. The fact that more people were going to die for this mission—for Victor, essentially—slid right down his back like the deaths of so many others had in the past.
Victor considered for a moment. “What about extraction?”
“What a question! The answer is that we’re working on it. Something—a new defense code, maybe, or maybe the incoming quake? It’s messing with our systems like hell. Normally, we’d have it figured out in a few hours, but you don’t have that much time. You’ve got to get out of range of the interference. Up, most likely.”
“And Oscar’s body?”
A valuable commodity, potentially.
“Don’t worry about it. He’s likely just to slow you down. We don’t want to lose two investments today.”
Victor could put it together pretty easy from there. “Take out the target. Get the data. Get to high ground.”
“Hot damn! You got it.”
There was a short blip, and the small pressure of the open line faded from Victor’s skull.
High ground, huh?
The highest ground around was the Tower, of course. It would take him a good half-hour to get to the top if everything went as well as possible.
A half an hour was too long by a lot. He was going to have to ride this quake out no matter what.
Time to get Oscar, then.
Overhead, a police transport flew by, copbots hanging down on mechanical tethers. Spotlights shining through the smog. Did they know about the quake, readying themselves to help?
Robots were probably driving the transport. Did a robot know anything?
Did a clone?
Useless thoughts.
Carefully, Victor tossed a stick and then a rock across the threshold of the small fortified shack. No response. If he had the time, he would have perhaps picked up someone off the street and bribed or coerced
him to move through, catching all the trap flak. But he didn’t have the time.
With a bit of unintended flourish from his makeshift tarp-cloak, he rolled through the opening. Nothing. Okay. He let the tarp fall. No more need now that he was inside.
He turned a corner and something stuck hard into his side. Thrums of movement reverberated in his body.
Some kind of spike. Victor groaned, sliding himself off of it. It went in about the length of a thumb joint, which was more than enough to send feelings of queasiness to his belly. It popped out slowly, little trails of blood following and leaving red drool down his side. His rib cage on that side was all metal, lucky for him, otherwise the spike might have broken something.
In front of the stairs was another tripwire—connected to a bomb or another set of spikes, maybe. He cut the wire with his force gun: thup thup. Downstairs he found Oscar, already with his hands up. He looked a lot like Victor, just with messier hair and a massive collection of acne around his cheeks, trailing down his neck.
Oscar had set himself up a nice little base. Computer equipment lined the walls, built into the foundation of the earth. Hard to detect with sensors—but not impossible. There was enough computer tech there to do almost anything—including spy on Tri-American for a very long time.
“You don't have to do this,” said Oscar. Sweat beaded down his forehead.
Victor shook his head. “Come on. Really?”
In Victor's world, Oscar was known for his slippery loyalties. This meant a lot of rationalization, and a lot of rationalization meant a lot of bargaining with the world. And Victor was the entire world, approaching on Oscar, expecting its due after far too much debt had built up.
“You shouldn't even be able to do this. I mean, I knew someone might came after me, but someone from the Alphabet? You can't even hurt me.”
Victor had two guns. His other was strapped to his ankle. They were both of the same design. The guns fired small pockets of very dense air coated with clouds of carbon. People called it a force gun. It made a very tiny sound, thup thup, when Victor shot Oscar in the knee. To follow, Victor tossed Oscar's head against a nearby cabinet. His teeth fell out in droplets.
“Oh god.” Understanding lit up in Oscar’s eyes. “You're Victor. I thought maybe Charlie o-or Kilo at most, but...hey man, I'm an investment! You can't just kill me...”
Victor shook his head. “Of course I can. Where's the data?”
For a few moments, Oscar looked as if he was going to play dumb. Victor raised his pistol up, ready to hit him.
“God, okay. There. Right there, in the drawer.”
Victor found the collection of black slabs and attached a small disc to the top of one. A green hologram floated up. Approval. Task completed.
“You chose the wrong team, Oscar.”
“Man, don’t you get it?” Blood seeped down his clothes, filling up his shoes and then puddling outward. “I wasn’t playing for anybody. Just playing the two teams against each other, that’s all. What else do we got? What else does anybody have except trying to pull just a little bit of wool over their eyes? They own all of us. Every part. I just...” Oscar shook his head, spitting out blood and another tooth. “Fingers in everything. Even if you didn’t come to kill me, they were gonna kill me.”
Victor had heard it all before, and he didn’t have time for this.
“Okay, then.”
Overhead, he heard creaking and shouting. Busting, breaking noises. Then the wall caved in. He dived out of the way, dodging the two falling bodies, but the debris knocked against him hard all along his left side.
Victor, groaning, stood up, favoring the one side. Oscar groaned too, the two fallen idiots right on top of him. A man and a woman, both young and bleeding from scrapes they took in the collapse. The woman had one eye and tech all along one arm. The two had been fighting, maybe, and came in through the bad masonry of the wall.
It was time to get out of here. He shot Oscar in the head—the blood and bone softly shuffling out of his skull—and limped quickly to the stairs.
“Oh my god!”
Victor stopped. At the hole, where everything had caved in, was a beautiful young woman, hand to her mouth. But she was beautiful in...in a way Victor didn’t understand.
In the course of his job he had come across many women who were probably more beautiful than most of the others in the world. At the one-percent of the one-percent mark, beauty entered into an arena where even the slightest flaw marked someone down for being chosen by the most wealthy. Trillionaires never had wives over the age of thirty, and if they did, these women were supported and surrounded by such an amazing array of implants and tech that they could have funded the GDP of whole countries, back in the day when countries actually existed.
This woman wasn’t that kind of beautiful. Her hair wrapped around her shoulders, a loose tangle. She was...she reminded him of something. In the way that a sunset would sometimes tug at his heart, in the way that he could not listen to rock and roll without pushing down the sensation of his bouncing legs. Something about her was wrapped around him, already, and seeing her had only woken that part of him.
He put his gun away.
“You need to get out of here,” he said up to the woman. “You need to do it right now.”
She stepped down through the rubble, staring at Victor with a challenge in her eyes
“Or what?” she asked. “Are you going to kill me? Fine. Kill me, then. I’m poor forever. I don’t care. Nothing matters when you’re poor. Haven’t you heard?”
“No. There’s...there’s an earthquake. Very soon. We should go.”
It struck him, this “we” he employed so casually. Still, she didn’t move—the young man underneath her in the rubble tried to glom onto her leg. Victor stepped forward and stomped down on his face.
Watching this, the woman half-sprouted a protest, and then stopped. She smiled for a moment, and then stopped that as well. Victor grabbed her.
“What’s your name?”
“Ana.”
“Okay, Ana. You really want to die?”
“No. I was being—”
“It doesn’t matter. You want to get out of this town?”
“Yes.”
“Then follow me, and let’s go.”
She cooperated without any trouble or backtalk. A woman well-accustomed to being told what to do by a man in charge. He knew this about her; instinctively, he knew it.
Outside, he put a hand to his ear. “Mike? Mike, are you there?”
There was no response. The debris had probably damaged the circuitry somehow. Sometimes excessive noise overloaded the circuits. That wasn't supposed to happen, but that was the way with technology. Always frequent with wonders until it was dead weight in your head.
“Mike, I'm heading to the rendezvous. I have the data. I'll see you in thirty minutes.”
This was, he knew even then, rather wishful thinking.
* * * * *
“This is my room,” said Samson. “Don’t break anything.”
“No way.” The copbot slapped its metal fists together. “Only if there’s a bad guy’s face, huh partner?”
Samson’s room was larger than most others on the floor but still smaller than he wanted it to be. The ideal would be a whole floor, maybe, or even a whole building. Just some cave of a warehouse where he could build whatever he wanted with no interruptions. If he could have an entire floor, man. He would have whole assembly lines set up, and working ones too, not like that junk down in the slums. Weapon after weapon, armor after armor, and Crash would never get hit by anything nor worry about anything neither.
But he had a room, layered and layered again with circuitry and with parts, with jars full of free-floating nanos eating away at each other and reproducing like mad. Nanos were the lifeblood of tech, all its uses. The way it integrated with the human body, the way that it could rebuild and adapt.
Long systems of pipes and vacuum tubes ran across the ceiling—Samson
needed cooling, heating, freezing, boiling at different intervals and all of it immediate. The room next to his produced climate creation for the entire floor, but eighty percent of its usage was dedicated to Samson’s work.
Long tables, all of them loaded down with metal scrap and organizing bins of nuts and bolts and screws and so on, bordered the walls. He loathed that he had to have space for a toilet.
He did not have a bed. He did not want one. Most of the time he slept on the floor, clearing away whatever rubbish was beneath him. Crash could die while Samson slept, so why risk enjoying sleep? He might do it too often.
Samson had been sleeping, after all, when the men came in and killed his parents.
No sooner had Samson closed the door than did someone knock at it—slammed, really, demanding entry with physicality. Directly after entering, Samson had piled junk in front of the door to make room for Partner. Now he had to move it aside again.
Crash. It would only ever be Crash at Samson’s door.
Jackson Crash was the type of man who filled every room he entered, even one already overfilled like Samson’s. In a crowd of hundreds, he would be noted by nearly everyone as the most important person present—this even if no one knew who he was. In a one-on-one conversation, he elevated himself to something like an avatar, a deity, a demigod—knowing and handling. Seen it all, done it all. Show me what you got. His charisma wrapped others in his wake.
His nose was just slightly too big for his face, hanging down like the edge of an executioner’s axe. The rest of his face—his jaw and eyes—seemed streamlined in toward the middle, angling out his head. He had a tall, wiry frame, covered over in an expensive suit that looked made of silk. Samson knew it was really all tech—knew that in an instant, the silk appearance could alter into a series of interlocking plates that offered Crash complete protection.
It was a one-of-a-kind item, and because it was the first of its kind, it had so far broken down often. So many moving pieces couldn’t help but get in the way of one another sometimes. The suit required updates and maintenance almost every day, but that was okay by Samson. He liked the work, and it kept him useful to Crash. It kept Crash alive.
Up The Tower Page 6