Windswept

by Adam Rakunas

  Banks coughed and gurgled, “Did you have to hit so hard?”

  “What the fuck?” I yelled. “You’re... you’re a fucking Ghost!”

  “I prefer Covert Business Interference Asset,” he said, his voice raspy.

  “You shot at me!”

  “I shot near you,” he said.

  Outside, a shadow fell on the courtyard, and dust and leaves battered the windows like they’d been swirled up by a typhoon. No, not a typhoon; it was the downwash of a cargo airship as it descended over the hutong like a belly-flopping whale. I looked at Banks, who wobbled to his feet, then limped for the ceiling hatch, grabbing onto the lever lock with both hands. As I pushed against the corrugated lines of the can’s ceiling, the lever budged a centimeter, then two, then swung wide. I kicked my legs through the open panel like a trapeze artist and scrambled up to the roof.

  The courtyard rang with gunfire and the scream of the airship’s drive turbines. I looked over the side of the cargo can. Three dozen police worked on the door with blowtorches and battering rams while the rest shot upward at the airship. I pinged Soni direct, hoping she was down in the scrum. One of the cops put down her blowtorch and looked around, and I whispered a quick prayer to Soni’s ambitions and line-of-sight telecom.

  “There are Ghosts here!” I yelled.

  “You think I don’t know that?” she yelled back. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

  “I’m in trouble?” I said, ducking as the airship made another pass. “All I’ve been through in the past day, I’m pure as driven sand. Hell, even Bloombeck’s in more trouble than me. Fucker shot me.”

  “Are you all right?” Soni asked.

  “Shoulder hurts, leg’s hit, but otherwise, yeah.”

  “Good,” said Soni, “‘cause as soon as we get into this flat and rescue your ass, I’m going to kick it halfway to Chino Cove.”

  “I had nothing to do with this!”

  “I know that,” said Soni. “Your driver, Jilly, she sent word that something was going on, but I’m tempted to get you to pay for all this. Especially after the serious shit we found out–”

  I was about to reply when the deafening shriek of four eight-thousand horsepower MacDonald Heavy Industries jet turbines drowned me out. The airship hung right on top of us, cargo claws descending. I looked back at the hatch, where Banks was working his way up; his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him over the crush of sound.

  I’ve been caught outside only once during a hurricane, and it was for a very good reason: the shelter where I’d holed up had run out of food, and I’d volunteered to make a run for fresh supplies. (Of course, the “shelter” was actually the old Library Lager brewpub down on Paper Street, and the “supplies” were Old Windswept, but no one had to know that.) It was the most terrifying twenty minutes of my life as the winds knocked me into buildings and tipped my commandeered tuk-tuk from side to side.

  The downwash from the airship was a thousand times worse. I crouched, tried to crab-walk away, but my hair snapped at my face so much I couldn’t see where to go. The closer the ship got, the heavier the wind, until I was flat on the ground. The weight of all that air, it pressed me more and more into the deck until I could feel every seam in my clothes, every bit of fleck of dust, and the weight of Bloombeck’s gun grinding into my waist.

  I flipped on my back. The wind stung my eyelids, but I didn’t need to see to know the turbine was right overhead. My hands dove into my pockets, and out came the gun. It had been a long time since my B-school mandated weapons training – after all, you couldn’t sell WalWa’s defense products without knowing how they worked – but there was something to be said for the blind panic you feel when a ceramic fan blade was going to grind you into paste. I flipped the safety and pulled the trigger; there was a horrific screech, like a giant dragging his fingernails across the world’s biggest blackboard. The wind died, and I opened my eyes to see the airship lift away, one of its turbines smoking.

  I got up. “What did you do?” Banks said. “Yell at it?”

  I held up the gun, and he shook his head. “No way,” he said. “There is no way you broke that thing with a beanbag.”

  “I told you these things hurt,” I said, pointing it at him. “You want to find out?”

  Banks held up his hands. “I left my weapon down there,” he said. “I do not want to hurt you.”

  “Why should I believe anything you’ve told me?” I said. “You’re a fucking Ghost. You lie, you destroy, you kill. Did you kill Bloombeck?”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “But someone did,” I said. “Who was it? Your one-eyed pal?”

  “She’s not that good a shot,” he said. “Mimi did it.”

  I cocked my head. “You expect me to believe that that sobbing mess is a Ghost?”

  Banks nodded. “If we’d have done our jobs right, you’d had never known we were here.”

  “Looks like you didn’t.”

  “Well, shit, Padma we didn’t expect you to pluck us out of the ocean!” yelled Banks. “It was supposed to be Saarien!”

  I felt the gun arm waver, so I clamped my free hand around my wrist to prop it up. “All this time, all that we did, you were in bed with Saarien?”

  “We were investigating Saarien,” said Banks. “All the equipment and chemicals he’s been buying over the past decade got on our radar. He was up to something. We planted a story about potential Breaches with the local company directorate to lure him out. You took the bait instead.”

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  “It was lucky,” said Banks, “because we got to do more with you looking over us than we would have with Saarien. You saw what he’s doing to his own people. That’s all going to change.”

  “Then why is he still alive?” I said. “And why was a corpse that was supposed to be him in the freezer? And what the hell happened to Thanh? Don’t tell me he was a Ghost, too.”

  “Not really, no,” said Banks. “He was just our... our luggage, I guess.”

  “I swear to fucking God I will shoot you right now just to get you to stop lying.”

  “Thanh was not a person!” said Banks, taking a step back. “He was a hollow dummy made from vat-grown meat. Our gear was inside him.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “That’s the job!” said Banks. “You think we can just show up with a duffel bag full of weapons and armor at the lifter and say, ‘Hi, we’re a Ghost Squad, here to upturn the core of the local economy’? You think we would’ve gotten that far?”

  “Did you have something to do with the body?” I said. “Saarien’s?”

  “No,” said Banks. “We’re still trying to figure that one out.”

  “Then what about Estella Tonggow?” I said. “Did Mimi kill her, too?”

  “I don’t know,” said Banks. “That wasn’t part of our job. None of those people’s fake murders were. The people who attacked us at the office, Tonggow, that wasn’t us.”

  My gun hand wavered a moment. I steadied it. “Saarien did all that?”

  “We think so.”

  “Then Tonggow might still be alive?”

  “Maybe,” said Banks. “It’s not my job to find out.”

  “Your job.” I thumbed the gun’s hammer back in place and put it in my pocket. “Your job is to make trouble and lie and make our lives miserable so the Big Three can keep grinding a little more value out of us for their Shareholders. You happy with your job?”

  “Not really, no,” said Banks. “I was telling the truth when I said I wanted to leave.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “If you really wanted to Breach, you could’ve told me at any time. I would’ve driven you to the Hall myself and gotten you signed in and protected.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” said Banks.

  “What isn’t?” I said.

  “The truth,” he said. “I really am a lawyer, and I really was sorry to hear what happened to you.”

  The whole w
orld shook and bucked, knocking us down. I looked up: the airship hadn’t flown off; it had just picked up altitude to give its cargo cables some slack. The can lifted, a few centimeters at a time, and Banks and I ran for it. Or, rather, he ran like hell, and I gimped along on my still-wounded leg. He leaped over the edge, but I couldn’t make the distance fast enough. By the time I got to the end of the roof, there was a ten-meter gap between us, and Banks looked back, yelling and kicking roof fixtures.

  I dumped everything from my pai over to his. “Put this all on the Public,” I called. “Make sure it’s timestamped and notarized and all that other legal bullshit.”

  “You stay on the line,” he said. “I’ll get the police, and we’ll track you–”

  The call went dead, and I watched him and the hutong get smaller and smaller as the airship picked up speed.

  Chapter 23

  For a brief moment, I thought about shimmying up one of the cargo cables and blasting my way into the cockpit. Not a bad idea, except that MacDonald Heavy had been building anti-piracy measures into their craft since the days of the Spanish Armada. The cables were probably serrated or electrified or slippery as hell, and they wouldn’t lead to anywhere but tiny compartments filled with nothing but more of the same cabling. The underside would be covered in smart darts or dumb guns or Christ-knew-what. Besides, the cockpit was sealed and unlockable only by the ground crew, who needed levered keys the size of cellos.

  Jumping was still an option, though one that probably wouldn’t end well. I looked over the side of the can and saw Brushhead fall away, row after row of terraced roof farms and winding streets and everything I’d known and loved for the past twelve years. I’d never seen it from the air like this. I let my pai record, hoping it would catch all this. Someone would want to see it, even it had to be at my wake.

  The roof hatch opened, and a masked head popped up. This one looked like a wolf with a flattened snout. “Get in here, Padma,” it said, its amplified and distorted voice grating above the airship’s engines.

  “What is it with you people and the masks?” I yelled. “Someone take their anthropology class a little too seriously?”

  “You know you’re not going to jump, and I don’t want to have to come out there and get you.”

  “Is that you, Ellie?” I yelled. “I can’t tell with that mask covering your beautiful eye.”

  The Ghost slid its mask up, and One-Eye shook her head. “Don’t give me a hard time,” she said, her voice still sounding goony. “I have to take you in alive, but no one said anything about you being undamaged.”

  “What are you gonna do, taser me?” I yelled. “I could have a seizure, roll right off this roof. How’d your boss like that?”

  “Jesus Christ, why are you being so difficult?” she yelled back, her own voice cutting over the helmet’s speakers.

  “What else have I got right now?” I yelled back. “If being a pain in your ass is the only card I have left, I’m gonna play it.”

  A look flashed across One-Eye’s face, like frustration getting pummeled by anger with an extra slap from resignation. It was a good look for her. “If you come in, I’ll let you know what’s going on,” she said, turning off the distortion effects. She even attempted a smile.

  I shrugged. “Don’t care.”

  “Bullshit!” yelled One-Eye, pointing a gloved finger at me. “Everything that’s been going on for the past two days, how could you not care? Hell, I’ve been trying to kill you!”

  “Yeah, but you failed every time,” I said. “And since you haven’t shot me from that hatch or come up here and thrown me overboard, that means you need me alive. Who’s got the upper hand in this negotiation?”

  “This is not a negotiation!” she screamed. “We are not back in that shitty little office on Vishnu’s Palm, and I am not watching you show me how to make sure a shipment of napkins appears on time!”

  “Vishnu’s Palm? How... What the hell are you talking about?”

  She shook her head. “You really don’t remember, do you? No, of course not, how could you? You never paid attention to anyone but yourself. Even when you stomped all over everyone back at Entertainment Management, you didn’t care.”

  One-Eye’s face was red, her eyes narrowed and her cheeks taut. For a moment, her scars looked more like wrinkles, and I remembered, a long time ago, that same face screaming at me from a video conference. It had been a much younger face on a much skinnier body, but the way spit flew from her teeth as she cursed me and swore to take me down, that hadn’t changed.

  “Nariel?” I said.

  She nodded. “Took you long enough.”

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “You did,” she said. “After Vishnu’s Palm, I got blamed for everything: the supply chain breakdown, the riots, the low-g puking. All of it.”

  “That shouldn’t have happened.”

  “But it did,” said Nariel, showing me her teeth. “And there was no way to come back with that kind of black spot on my record. I was poison to every single division at Corporate. Even the brothels wouldn’t take me as management. The only way to keep up my end of my Indenture was to completely switch jobs. I had to become a ship’s engineering mate. You know what it’s like to go from management to the lowest, shittiest job in the company?”

  “Ship’s engineer’s still a good gig,” I said.

  “I was somebody before you came along!” she yelled. “I was going places, and I was going to write my own ticket, and you fucked me over!”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said, sitting down. “You never did the work, Nariel. You didn’t listen to me. You didn’t go over the details.”

  “Well, I’m going over them now,” she said, and she whipped out a taser and shot me.

  Good thing I was already on the ground, or the fall would have knocked me out. I wished I’d been knocked out; it would have saved me from the horrible feeling of having every muscle lock as my brain lit up.

  By the time a squad of goons hauled me into the cargo can, the pain had stopped. I might as well have been a bundle of palm fronds from the way they passed me down the hatch to the floor. My entire body felt like it was made out of wood, and my mouth and tongue kept making embarrassing sounds every time I tried to talk.

  “That was just as much fun as I’d hoped,” Nariel said, holstering her taser. “I’ll have to see if I can do that again.”

  “Unghaagh.” My hands were wads of bread dough, but there was a tingle in my arms.

  “Priceless,” she said, tapping her temple. “The image of you going down like a sack of coconuts is one that I will treasure for a long, long time.”

  “Unghaaffff...” A little more feeling, and my hands managed to find my pockets.

  “God, even now, you can’t keep quiet, can you?”

  “Fuhhhh...” My fingers found the gun. My thumb flicked the safety, and the rest of my fingers gripped as tightly as they could.

  “‘Fuck you’? Is that the best you’ve got?” Nariel laughed, and the other goons chuckled with her. She hunched over me, her inked and scar-puckered face hovering above mine.

  “Fuh...forgot...” I hoped I had enough fine motor control to pull this off.

  “What? To up the voltage?”

  “...to frisk me.” And I pulled out the gun, held it under her chin, and fired.

  Nariel didn’t just scream, she yowled, a trapped animal roar. She brought both hands to her face, which gave me plenty of room to kick her in the gut. She rolled away, and I got to my feet, as wobbly as they were. I fired off what was left in the mag as I gimped for the hatch. The goons shouted, and Nariel roared as best she could with her now-shattered jaw, “KILL HER!”

  I threw the empty gun and connected with her face. Two goons swung their rifles at me, but I pulled myself up through the hatch into cool, salt air.

  We were now over open ocean, low enough to get some spray and high enough to scare the shit out of me. The can thudded and shook, and I held onto the hatch
’s lockarm as hard as I could while I tried to get my bearings. The lifter port lay dead ahead. The sea churned with traffic: tugs pulling flotillas of empty drop cans to watering stations, then queuing to load the filled cans on the up line. Quick launches snagged runaway debris for the recycler, and barges hauled fresh crews to the port, an island of coral steel and rock and thousands of kilometers of shimmering, black ribbon climbing up into the sky.

  Dozens of airships loaded with priority cargo from the down line headed to shore, all of them skimming the tops of the waves to take advantage of the ground surface effect. But a few flew toward the port, and all of those were hauling cargo cans. I tried again and again to get a hold of someone, anyone, but my pai refused to make a connection.

  The hatch blew open, and Nariel clambered onto the roof. Her jaw, purple and bruised, hung open, and she roared as she charged me. I had no room to dodge, and no agility to do it, so I just turned and leaped over the side of the can.

  Time didn’t slow down like they said it would during Sudden Disaster Preparedness. Everything, the wind, the surf, the water, all of it rushed up at me, and it took everything I had to do what my instructors had drilled into my head: point my toes at the sea, hold my hands to the sky, and clench everything closed as hard as I could. The water was cold and clear, and it felt like I fell forever, but I followed my bubbles as I grabbed my way up, until something dark and heavy fell on top of me. I fought to right myself, and looked straight into Nariel’s eye. She yelled what sounded like my name, but the red foam bubbling from her mouth garbled it.

  The weight of her armor pulled us both down, and I couldn’t break her grip on my shirt. I also couldn’t get out of my shirt, thanks to an arm that refused to move properly. Nariel gave me a broken-toothed smile, one that said she was perfectly happy to drown as long as I went with her. Everything started to darken, and my lungs burned, and I realized that if this was the way I was going to die, it would be even more embarrassing than going out in a sewer pipe. I was about to be killed by a Ghost, the hardest of the Big Three hardcore, and that was unacceptable.