METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Nothing for it but to keep moving. Mindy crossed the roadbed at a fast sprint, then ducked into the ferns to get away from the obvious location.

  She nearly stumbled over the wounded man. Well, dead now. Bashar’s second shot had blown open his temple from above. He’d rolled over as he died, but his face looked unzipped.

  Mindy stopped and threw up. The harsh sting of stomach acid lodged in her nose and sinuses even as she spewed the remains of her hamburger across the body. She’d been in a few shootouts, but that was always a terrible failure of policing. She’d even killed several times, always in the heat. But somehow this was personal.

  Shivering now, she realized it was because they’d tried to kill her. Personally at that, not just because she was one of a crowd of badges cornering a bad guy.

  She straightened from emptying her guts out just as a bullet smacked into the loam in front of her. Mindy dropped and rolled over the one-eyed corpse to put the man’s body, and body armor, between her and the shooter.

  High angle?

  Bashar’s rifle popped once, then twice more. A moment later she heard a heavy thump as something fell into the ferns nearby.

  She lay very still for several silent minutes, then carefully replenished the partially emptied clip of her riot pistol. The dead man stank of blood and shit, as dead men tended to do, and stared at the forest canopy in the empty-eyed surprise that most fresh corpses shared. Nothing moved around her, and Mindy was very careful with her own motions as she worked with the weapon.

  Bashar was out there somewhere, covering her, or hunting any more of these bastards. The only reason she was alive now, probably three times over, was because of that old man. He could have just walked off into the woods, and she would never have known, because the sniper’s second shot would have killed her.

  “I owe you, you old Green bastard,” Mindy whispered, barely mouthing the words. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  After about ten minutes a hummingbird began to chitter. Mindy hadn’t seen a lot of hummingbirds up in the forest, so she figured it was Bashar signaling her. Unfortunately, she didn’t know squat about birdcalls, so she meowed.

  That brought a short burst of laughter. He walked out of woods from the canyon side, simply melting into being from the shadows.

  “I’ve covered the perimeter,” Bashar said. “We’re clear, for right now, but we’d best get a move on.”

  Mindy got to her feet, nudging the dead man with her foot. “Neo-hippies.”

  “I don’t think so.” He frowned at the corpse. “We were supposed to believe that, if we’d somehow spotted them and still survived. But look at his hair.”

  “Short,” she said. “Like a cop. Or a soldier.”

  “Or any number of other people. But the guys up here run to dreadlocks and annualized bathing. Not regular haircuts and squeaky-clean.”

  “Who?” she asked, fearing she already knew the answer.

  Bashar knelt and swiftly searched through the man’s clothes. “Nothing. Everybody has crap in their pockets. Lint, pennies, a crumpled napkin, the butt of a joint. This guy was a pro.” He glanced at her. “From your world, not from the daughter-cities.”

  Not one of us, she read that as Bashar’s ‘us,’ not Cascadia LEC’s.

  “The Lightbull people. But how’d they get here so fast?”

  “We haven’t been up here long enough ourselves for someone to mount a full false flag operation as a direct response to our presence. Whoever sent you up to Cascadiopolis tipped them, either on purpose, or because their own security was compromised.”

  “Franklin,” she said shortly. Mindy had wondered why he’d bothered to send her after such an old, cold case. “The lieutenant I work for. But if for some damned reason he wanted me dead, there’s easier ways to kill me. And he might be on the take here and there, but not to people like this.” She gave the corpse a good, hard kick.

  “Somebody’s got a pipeline into Cascadia LEC.” Bashar shrugged. “And water is wet. Time to get moving. Especially if we’re going to meet up with this Crown of yours.”

  “Why’d you change your mind about that?” Though she could guess.

  “Lightbull’s here, now. We’re close to something. Or this is bigger and deeper than I thought. So maybe that conversation has value to me after all. Besides,” he added, “someone took a shot at us. That makes it personal, miss Detective Mindanao Fleischer.”

  “Mindy,” she replied, thinking over his words. “To my friends.”

  “Got very many friends?”

  “No, not really.” She grimaced at Bashar. “I see you know from cops.”

  “Fair enough.” He smiled, a genuine grin, and once again she saw a flash of what had once been a dangerous charisma.

  Now she had no answer at all. Just four dead men she’d have to explain sooner or later, and a vehicle that was a line-of-duty write off. The paperwork alone was going to make her head explode.

  Thumbing new bullets into his strange rifle, Bashar headed off into the woods. “Coming?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Guess we’re walking back to Portland.” She wasn’t looking forward to that. At least it was summer, and the woods weren’t neck deep in snow.

  “Hell, no,” said Bashar. “We travel in style.”

  Wondering what the old man was on about, Mindy followed him deeper into the woods. Was he a friend now?

  Dad would have liked this man.

  * * *

  Late night talk show host Sony Sushi, in conversation shortly before his death in a street mugging:

  The true brilliance of conspiracy theories is that there are real life conspiracies everywhere. They are somewhat akin to the political technique of the Big Lie, in that one can conceal a brazen, unsettling truth in plain sight. And while the cell system is surely as old as humanity’s first hunting parties, it has been refined over the years by everyone from the Jesuits to the Communists. Culture sabotage is a high and ancient art, come into a Renaissance in these late days when we all fight over scraps from a glorious past that most of us can still remember first-hand. What to believe? Whom to credit? Soon enough we will all be conspiracies of one, trusting in no person or thing.

  Consider this: there are powers in the world that want it that way. How will you fight them?

  * * *

  Heresies within heresies, ancient wisdoms hiding in plain sight

  “Sir?”

  Crown awoke. How had he been sleeping so much lately? Why? He was tempted to stop all his drugs, but he knew he was likely to die of pain if he did so. “What?” His voice was even more of a croak. If there were many frogs left, he’d sound like one now.

  It’s not easy being Green.

  “We have received a telephone call from Detective Mindanao Fleischer. She reports that she and Bashar are returning to Portland from the Cascadiopolis site. They will be prepared to meet with you tonight or tomorrow.”

  He glanced at the armored window that looked toward Mt. Hood. Close to dusk. How long had this day been? Dozens of hours? Time was bleeding together more and more.

  One good thing about de-industrialization, he thought. A person could see the mountains again, for the first time in decades.

  He’d been born within sight of the Cascade volcanoes, and he’d die within sight of them, but he’d lived most of his life without a glimpse of them.

  And to think, he’d wanted to fly.

  “Sir?” It was Kornbluth again.

  “What?”

  “Do you still wish to meet with Detective Fleischer and this Bashar?”

  “Yes. But not … in this damned … hospital bed.”

  “We will be some days acquiring a Gold Man exoskeleton,” said Heinlein. “Your alternatives are limited.”

  “Well … get someone in here … to sit me up … and put some … decent clothes … on me.”

  “You are very frail, sir.” Now Hubbard was ganging up on him, too. “You might prefer remote conferencing with a presenc
e filter.”

  “No. I want to meet … Bashar … again.” Breathe, breathe, breathe. “Ask him … what really happened.” With a surge of certainty that had no origin, Crown added, “He knows something about Tauroctony … I am certain.”

  “There are numerous loose ends now, which may be related,” said Kornbluth, “but actual fact patterns are rarely that convenient.”

  “They steal from me, they kill.” Crown stared out the window again for a moment. “Only the … government … is allowed to do that.” He gathered his anger. “And I didn’t vote for those bastards.”

  Kornbluth sounded concerned now. “Rest easy, sir.”

  “Resting, resting.” Then, almost querulous: “Where are my security contractors?”

  “We’ve engaged four, sir. Attempting to reach agreements on three more, for overlapping round-the-clock coverage.”

  “Brief them on the … bull-slayers. Then have the best … two, I think … here when Bashar c-comes in.” Crown’s thoughts got lost in a coughing fit that lasted so long eventually a human nurse came in to see to him.

  * * *

  Later, he felt much more lucid. The night outside was deep dark. His room was quiet except for the humming of machines with their faint odors of ozone and saline. He spent time going through Kornbluth’s summary reports of the last few days, striving to keep the details fresh in mind like he had done most of his life. Not so long ago, Crown could manage major projects without keyboard or paper. These days, he could barely manage to stay awake.

  Solipsism was tempting. The world was dying, there was no denying it. So was he. Likely the world would be reborn under a Green rubric, or some other vision strong enough to survive the final collapse of Western free market capitalism’s ravaged economic and physical infrastructures, but for now everybody and everything was on the downswing.

  Or at the bottom, if one was an optimist.

  Crown had never made money betting on optimism. All you found at the bottom were corpses and whale shit. He was a corpse-in-waiting, that was surely true, but he’d be damned if he was going to go out buried in whale shit.

  He wanted the J. Appleseed Foundation out of trouble. He wanted whatever heat was on the Cascadiopolis daughter-cities to back off. And he wanted his money to do some damned good in the world after he was gone.

  “Kornbluth. Heinlein. Hubbard.”

  “Sir?” It was Hubbard who answered.

  Somehow, Crown got the impression he’d interrupted them over poker or something. How much did they talk amongst themselves? What did that even mean with expert systems?

  “When the Gold Man … arrives, I will go … to Ciudad St. Helens.” Breathe, damn it! “I expect likely … I’ll die there, otherwise … I’ll die in transit.” He gathered his energy and prayed for his voice. “Once I’ve finished with Bashar, I am done. My assets will be disposed of under Protocol Leopold. I tell you three times.”

  “Sir,” said Kornbluth, “we strongly advise—”

  “Shut up! I want to die among … the trees. Not … wired to this … bed.” I would tell you this three times as well, he thought, if only for a moment you might believe me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a while he asked, “Have they come yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn,” said Crown. “I’ve not yet met … Asset Tau.”

  Wisely, his expert systems did not respond.

  * * *

  Bashar, thought Mindy, was a lunatic of the first order. She could appreciate charismatic madness from a distance, but scraping ten meters above the treetops in a hydrogen-powered microlight was too close.

  The tiny airplane moved very slowly, perhaps seventy kilometers of airspeed, and Bashar flew like a butterfly: jerking back and forth, swerving around invisible obstacles, making right-angle turns and occasional reversals. All in the depths of night’s darkness, the moon yet unrisen over the mountains behind them.

  “Radar signature,” he said. “This thing shows up about the size of a swallow on air traffic control. Our weapons will light up scopes bigger.”

  “I notice we didn’t leave them behind.” Mindy was glad now that she’d thrown up next to the corpse. It gave her less to heave now as Bashar lurched them into a turn so tight and slow she wondered they didn’t just fall into the pines below. Slung beneath the smartfiber wing, she could just about have kicked them if she had been so inclined. Still, her sinuses stung from stomach acid, and every breath left an awful taste about which she could do nothing.

  “Without weapons, we are naked,” he said.

  “Some weapons are in the mind, or the muscles.”

  “Of course.” She could hear the grin returning to Bashar’s voice. “But the mind can’t drop a sniper at eighty meters unassisted.”

  “Thank you.” Mindy’s voice came out smaller than she’d intended.

  “I like you.” After a long silence, he added. “I haven’t liked anyone in years.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “Surprised might be more appropriate.” The grin was still strong in his voice. “I know I am.”

  Mindy knew she had something of the measure of this man now, so she needled him a bit. “Sure you’re not just getting old?”

  “Show me someone who isn’t, and I’ll show you someone who’s dead.”

  She had to laugh at that, for all that the joke rang hollow against the four corpses they’d left behind them in the woods.

  “We’ll land on Powell Butte,” Bashar said. “Stash the microlight in a tree, and walk into town.”

  “I can call for pick-up,” she offered. “Crown would send a car.” So would Cascadia LEC, but she didn’t need some excitable ladder-climber taking Bashar in on any of his multitude of old warrants.

  “We’ll have to at some point, but nowhere near where I leave the aircraft off.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They broke out over farmland. He dropped the plane so low she could smell the cows in the dark beneath them. Hay, too, and a whiff of diesel. Someone out here—they were near Sandy, she thought—had the wealth and connections to still run a tractor.

  After a time of crossing fallow fields, stands of trees, and the slick strips of a rewilded highway, Mindy asked a question that had been nibbling at the edge of her thoughts for hours.

  “What else do you know about Lightbull and the bombings?”

  He didn’t answer at first, easing them along just above the old roadway that was now a carpet of flowers. She wondered if Bashar had heard her, or if he was ignoring the question.

  Finally, he answered. “Depends on what you mean by ‘know.’ Don’t have much data, many facts. Already told you that.”

  Ah hah, Mindy thought. He had left something out earlier, something that had been niggling at her since, below the level of conscious thought. “What else do you think?”

  “I think …” Bashar paused, apparently choosing his words with great care. “I think today was not the first time they tried to kill me. I think they’ve tried to buy me off, possibly twice, though with sufficient subtlety that I could not be sure of any part of that. Most of all, I think they sent Tygre to us in Cascadiopolis. Which makes it very hard for me to see Lightbull, or whoever they really are, as an enemy.”

  “They tried to kill you as recently as this afternoon. They bombed Cascadiopolis and the first daughter-city at Three Fingered Jack. I’d hate to meet your real enemies, if these people are not.”

  “Surely you’ve been shot at by friends.” His voice was deadly serious.

  She watched something pale and blobby slide by in a meadow beneath them. A parachute? “Actually, yes. It’s an occupational hazard of being a cop. But the Cascadiopolis bombing wasn’t friendly fire.”

  “Wasn’t it? What percentage of our population died?”

  “About one percent, I think.”

  “And how many daughter-cities do we have now?”

  “How would I know?” Mindy demanded. “Dozens.”

&nbs
p; “Does that sound like extermination to you?”

  “No …” She had to admit, he was right. “More like pruning. For growth.”

  “Right. This is what I have thought as well. Maybe Tygre was a gardener, sent to deadhead the Green movement so we’d blossom in a hundred new places. Maybe Lightbull are the landscape architects.”

  “So why try to kill us today?”

  “Secrecy. Paranoia. Due caution from their point of view.” He shrugged, setting the microlight to an alarming rocking that caused Mindy to retch. “Who are you and I to people who plan and think in terms of population across generations?”

  She had an answer for that, once she’d gotten her gut back under control. “I don’t know about you, but I’m someone who’d like to stay alive.”

  * * *

  Bashar landed the microlight in a burn scar on the shoulder of Powell Butte. It was an abandoned residential neighborhood, though in the dark Mindy could not tell if the rewilding had been deliberate or natural. Though the night was fairly cool, she was soaked with sweat, and her breath was still sour from the stomach-wrenching flight.

  Bashar smelled like a man. Not an old man, just, well, generically male. Strapped in close to him for the last hour and half, she’d come to appreciate his scent, though right now she’d appreciate a shower a great deal more.

  “How far do you want to go before we call Crown’s people for a pickup?” she asked him.

  “West of the 205 perimeter.”

  What had once been a major highway was now a defensive berm. Though Southeast Portland had grown so wild and anarchic that Mindy wasn’t sure whether the berm was keeping danger in or out. She figured people on both sides of the old highway were probably just as happy to be separated from the other side.

  Southeast Portland wasn’t dangerous in the usual sense, like the ruins of Beaverton, or Capitol Hill in Seattle. On those streets you could be mugged for your shoes, or the color of your eyes. People here were more political than desperate. But ever since the militia days of American conservatism, ‘political’ meant armed as often as not. The difference here was that they usually asked questions first and shot second. And even odds someone would bother to bury you if you got capped by a political. Get mugged in the usual fashion, and you’d be lucky to be put out with the garbage.