“I’m not trying to be ungrateful here, but we’re kind of pressed for time, and I don’t know if we’re really using our time wisely here,” she said. There was a lot of talk going on, but she couldn’t really make anything comprehensible or useful out of the din.
He swung his left leg back onto the floor and straightened his posture. “Patience is a virtue, you know. Trust me—I’ve got great hearing, we’ll catch some useful information, and I think you’ll be very happy with our meal,” he said.
Xero scoffed and wanted to argue, but this was clearly his turf, and she knew from experience that arguing with someone more familiar with a territory often didn’t end well. “You have some fucked up priorities,” she said.
He just grinned and looked around at the pandemonium in the restaurant. “No one has ever accused me of being normal,” he said.
She scrunched her mouth into a hard line. “Speaking of which, I’m not one to really pry into someone’s secret business, but I think there’s a big fucking elephant in the room I’d like to address, given that it looks like we’re going to be working together for a little while longer,” she said.
He leaned back into the corner again and breathed loudly.
“I don’t need gory details, I just want the essentials,” she said.
He looked around and flipped forward suddenly, tearing a chunk of the vinyl booth as it stuck to his gritty jacket before he came to a stop halfway across the table, inches from Xero’s face.
“I suppose this is as good a place as any to talk. No one’s going to hear jack shit in here with all this ruckus going on,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Just two things. I want to know how you shocked my ass when we were in the dead zones, and I want to know how you’re able to get around like a professional runner if you say you’re not from the pits,” she said.
“It’s actually one answer for both questions. I’m part robot,” he said.
She burst out laughing, slapping her hands against the cracked table hard enough to make spilled salt bounce into the air. “That’s a good one buddy, I’ll give it to you for creativity,” she said.
She raised her eyes again to meet his gaze, expecting him to start laughing with her, but he held his face still like weathered statue. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “What? You’ve got to be kidding—cybernetics were outlawed when I was a kid,” she said. After a series of unfortunate incidents, rising paranoia about the power of machines had caused the government to make a series of serious mandates limiting implantable cyborg technology. Penalties were so severe that even in the pits they didn’t mess with that kind of technology, as anyone caught with substantial implantable cybernetics would be executed immediately.
He tipped his head forward and kept his voice low. “There’s more than one reason that I prefer to be an independent contractor. In any event, I think we have enough intel on each other to make it clear that our mutual data will remain totally discreet” he said.
She smirked and lowered her head to the same level. “Absolutely discreet,” she said, paused, and shook her head. “Man, that is seriously fucking crazy though. Motherfucking robot mercenary.”
He let out a small puff of air and ran a hand through his hair. “That is one way to put it. In any event, since it may come up at some point, I am kind of like the ultimate runner because I have artificial lungs, and a few other modifications that give me certain…advantages,” he said.
Illegal cybernetics or not, she wanted him even more for the Grease Weasels. Considering the havoc going on in the world, they needed as many extraordinary abilities on their side as possible.
“Like turning yourself into a human Taser,” she said.
He turned his palms upward. “Amongst other things,” he said.
“I’m liking you more and more as time goes by,” she said. “One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me how that all went down. I’m sure it’s a great story.”
He sat up straighter so that he wasn’t mad-dogging her so intensely. “I take it you’d like to keep me around for awhile longer then,” he said.
“You’re a cool cat, Radar. I wouldn’t be sad if you stuck around—I figure we could both use some good allies right about now anyway,” she said and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of the mob escalating in volume. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the restaurant began heaving with an overflow of bodies. Despite the growing crowd, their booth in the back of the restaurant seemed to have a protective bubble around it, as though everyone was reflexively avoiding the mercenary and the cartel leader. Whether they were recognized or not, they just seemed like the wrong kind of characters to mess with.
Trudy the waitress tromped back towards their table carrying two huge plates of meat, two pieces of lemon meringue pie, and big mugs of coffee, somehow managing not to spill anything as she bounced her way around the increasingly rowdy throb of patrons. She slung the plates and mugs across the table and all of the food remained on the plates still. Amazingly, nothing spilled. Trudy had skills. With a grunt and a nod but no words she waded back into the fray of the restaurant.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had real coffee—for some reason that loser Xed hadn’t had any at his swanky casa, and it smelled and tasted amazing. She sucked half of it down in one go, not giving a shit that it singed her tongue. The rest of her body was already burned to some degree, may as well finish the job in the name of a good cause. The big plates were covered with what looked like turkey and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy. It didn’t look particularly appetizing, and it was certainly primarily sythmeals, but it was crafted to look and smell like real food, and that was a step above the nasty packaged slop.
She slid the plate over the uneven Formica table, but found it snagged on what she thought was an especially big crack. With another tug she revealed that it was a tiny manila envelope, and with a quick jingle and she knew it was keys.
“Is this what I think it is?” she said
He laced his fingers together. “Would I ever let you down?” he said.
She poked a finger at his chest. “You, sir, are a stranger to me, but you have an honest face. You wanna tell me where to stick these?” she asked.
He pointed to a back store room. “Where the sun don’t shine, naturally,” he said.
After traversing a creepy and dirty network of surprisingly labyrinthine back hallways, she came upon an impressive array of communication devices. Jackpot. She’d hit the mother load. They needed one of these in the Casa Grande flats—too bad Gila Bend was too far away from Phoenix for the government to move their staging area here—it would have made everything so much easier. She found her mind wandering off track. It would almost be worth expanding her distribution network further out here with the help of Radar just to have this kind of communication set up. Shaking her head to literally chase away those thoughts, she tried to focus on the tasks at hand. There were a thousand other problems to solve first, and kid in a candy store didn’t begin to cover her lust for the primo transmission gizmos. It was enough to make her forget that the store room smelled like decades of old grease and rat shit.
Her excitement faded when she realized that the information she had for the Grease Weasels back home would devastate Milo. She had been going over scenarios to try and get ahold of more Ketocillin, but there were no good options. The only other place she knew that was actively stocking it at the moment was New Orleans, and dealing with shit down there was extremely complicated. She wasn’t on great terms with the dome folks or the pit leader, and shit never went well when she had to do anything down in bayou country. Some of her accomplishments of the last week actually included meeting Xed and Radar—perhaps they would be new connections that would continue to be fruitful.
She hadn’t thought that she would be able to contact Xed until after she’d gotten back to the pits—it was much harder making a discreet call into the domes from an unsecure location without the right k
ind of equipment that one didn’t just find laying about. However, the unexpectedly robust equipment changed that, and she made the decision to try and get ahold of Xed first.
“Xero. Where are you?” he said, and she was taken aback by the concern in his voice. Boys. You fucked ‘em once, and they got all attached.
“I take it you got wind of the fiasco in Yuma,” she said.
“Absolutely. It’s chaos out there, but the military and media are doing their best to keep any of that info out of Phoenix. I can’t say I’m happy. I have operatives out there that I’ve lost contact with, and I haven’t been able to get anyone else on the ground to check it out. Do you have any intel you can share with me?” he asked.
“Not much, unfortunately,” she said and brought him up to speed on her adventures since departing from his place in the dome.
“Jesus. Well, I’m glad you came out alright,” he said. She hadn’t elaborated on the parts about Radar. Just as she’d been about to tell him about that portion of the story, she realized that she’d never really talked about Xed with Radar, other than confirming that they didn’t work together. In these circles, you never could be too careful. Your friend could very well be someone else’s mortal enemy, and loose lips could do more than just sink the damned ship.
“Barely, but I’ll take it, considering if I’d gotten to Yuma a few hours earlier than planned I’d have been toast,” she said, laughing when an awkward pause reminded her of why she’d left later in the first place. Turned out fucking Xed that last few times before getting on her way had been a really great decision. She still wasn’t sure about the rest of him, but he wasn’t a bad fuck.
“Now what will you do?” he said calmly.
“I was hoping you might have some suggestions, actually. I can figure out a way to get back to the Tucson pits, but I’m shit out of luck for Ketocillin,” she said.
There was silence on the other side of the line, and she waited for him to speak up. He cleared his throat. “Not to be too judgmental here or anything, but aren’t you not seeing the forest for the trees a bit here? We’ve had one of the biggest terrorist acts of the century go down, and we don’t know who or what might be next,” he said.
She scoffed. “Look, the world might be burning down around us, but there’s not much I can do about that right now. What I do know is that one of my comrades is dying, and I’m not going to let that go while I still have a chance to do something about it,” she said.
“You’re quite the admirable leader,” he said and she laughed a little too loudly. She didn’t think there was any way someone could hear her over the cacophony out in the dining room, but that was no reason to be careless.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever called me admirable before, but I’ll take the compliment. So. You got any bright ideas?” she said.
“If you’re game, I think we might be able to do a little bit of business. I want to figure out why whole cities are blowing up, and you want to save your associate. I’ll help you get to some Ketocillin, if you agree to help me find your buddy, Calavera. Somehow her skeletons are involved, and from what I have gathered she hasn’t been seen by anyone in over a week. If we can get her hands on her, or at least figure out what happened to her body, we might have some answers. I’m not exactly sentimental for these domes, but I don’t want to be inside one when it blows up, that’s for sure,” he said.
She stopped and thought about it. She wanted to find Calavera and kick her fucking ass anyway. Even if she didn’t have anything to do with the Yuma explosion, her skeletons had royally jacked up her whole goddamn week, and that wasn’t something she was going to let go without consequences. Getting help rustling up some Ketocillin in the process was just a big fat cherry on top of the sundae. Giving morons a good ass kicking wasn’t something she needed any prompting to do anyway.
After working out some of the details, she ended the transmission with Xed, feeling more hopeful about her prospects for the near future. With that business taken care of she was able to make the unpleasant call to Milo telling him what had happened. He’d already gotten word from their operatives about what had happened in Yuma, and he knew something was wrong when she dropped out of communication in the middle of the day.
“You’re alive!” Milo said in their code language when he picked up the call.
“I feel like we’ve been through this before,” she said.
“Well it keeps being relevant,” he said. She tried to feign annoyance, but it was kind of nice betting fretted over. Good to know someone still gave a damn.
She brought him up to speed again on their current status and her new plan to get some Ketocillin with Xed’s assistance.
“I don’t know if I like having to trust some stranger with Trina’s life,” Milo said, nearly whining.
“Do we really have much of a choice?” she said. “I’ll keep brainstorming in the meantime. Xed said that it would take a little bit of time to get back in touch with me once he was done nailing down the details. In the meantime, I’m going to get my ass back to the flats. I want all eyes and ears on the lookout for Calavera and Argon—we need to find them. Even if it’s just their corpses, I want to see bodies.”
Milo agreed with the plan and they resolved to put the tentative put things into motion. Once she’d dealt with the issue of the crawlers they’d find a good way to get Xero back to the pits where she could join the hunt in earnest. She knew Milo wasn’t comfortable with the plan, but neither was she—they just didn’t have a choice at the moment.
Her next call was jumbled and strange, and she was put on hold and passed around over half a dozen times before anyone would actually stay on the line for more than a few seconds. Eventually, she managed to convey the situation to someone with enough authority that would actually be able to give her authorization to deal with the cargo. The chaos actually worked in favor, and they agreed to most of what she had hoped for. They were striking the cargo and the crawlers from the record and releasing the gear as a casualty. As long as she submitted proper documentation for the losses they would be accounted for as acts of nature and war.
She conveniently didn’t bother to mention that she had maintained possession of her laser, but they wouldn’t have expected her to return to a home base of operations across the dead zones without a weapon. It was about as good of an outcome as she could have hoped for, and she secretly wondered if Xed might have had something to do with the smoothness of the process. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth.
She cut off transmissions with the dome and clenched one fist. Finally she was feeling a tenuous control over the situation. If they all didn’t blow up in the next terrorist attack, there just might be hope for them after all. Either that, or they would become giant shish kabobs in the next explosion.
CHAPTER 16
The room smelled as old as it really was, but the fact that they had a real, functioning hotel room in the first place was fairly amazing. It was connected to the back of the restaurant and shared its same unfortunately cheesy space décor. Ironic, because all space programs had ceased decades ago, and there were hardly even any satellites left in the sky. Peeling planet and star decals were clinging desperately to the walls and ceiling.
“Damn, that’s a really big scar,” Xero said.
“That’ll happen when your lungs are ripped out of your chest,” Radar said.
She dragged a ragged fingernail along the smooth line of old scar tissue that ran all the way down his ribcage. He was propped up in surprisingly clean hotel bed with his head resting on a stack of yellowed but fresh pillows. The faded blue sheets were tucked up to his belly button and a thin sheet of sweat coated his tan skin. He looked timeless to her somehow, like he could have been wandering the desert for decades without aging.
She flipped on top of him, her legs straddling his waist, her figure casting a shadow across him, the dim and bare lamp bulb illuminating her sagging Mohawk. Leaning down, she followed the same track along the scar wi
th her tongue, licking back up the slick indentation and ending with a kiss on his mouth.
“Tell me about how it happened,” she said.
He folded his arms up behind his head, the grooves in his arm muscles highlighted in deep shadows. “You want to hear how I was sliced open and my lungs were cut out of my body?” he asked.
She bared her teeth and wiggled playfully. “Yeah, tell me the tale of your suffering. Hearing about someone’s greatest misery tells me more about them than anything else,” she said.
“You’re a twisted fuck, aren’t you?” he said and grabbed her wrists.
She used gravity to push his hands backwards against the headboard. He still gripped her wrists, but she had his arms pinned. “I’ve been accused of worse things,” she said and waited.
“My parents were born in the flats, but when I was born, I wasn’t able to breathe the air out there. I was meant for the domes. They had the choice of giving me up, or finding a way to make me able to live in the flats.
She released his hands and he let go of her wrists. “Ah, one of the lucky children,” she said.
“Cursed is more like it, but yeah according to dome propaganda I would be one of the lucky ones,” he said. “Problem was, in those days there were social service authorization issues. If my parents weren’t allowed into the domes, then there wasn’t anyone to take care of me. I would be another burden to the system. As much as my parents would have liked to keep me, they wouldn’t have doomed me to die slowly and painfully, but they didn’t really have a choice. They couldn't get my Zone Pass approved to be adopted into the domes,” he said.
“That’s sad, man,” she said. “But you look like you came out okay in the end.”
He shook his head. “It’s not quite that simple. My parents were engineers, brilliant engineers in fact. Before the exiles they were responsible for a lot of the automated and cybernetic technologies that got the domes going in the first place. But once the mandate against any intelligent machines or implantable technologies that might lead to true cyborgs came into being, they were tossed out of the domes and most of their inventions were systematically destroyed. They knew they could build me artificial lungs, but they would have been executed if they’d caught doing something like that in the flats,” he said.
Under Dark Sky Law Page 15