‘My family’s dead, Ashley. I killed the last of them myself. Shot my father in the head. Bang! Brains everywhere.’ Annette tilted her head to the side and smiled.
Now Ashley’s eyes widened. Annette was fairly sure she had sold her faked attitude to patricide. ‘What do you want?’ Ashley said.
‘The location of the lab they’re making snakebite in. Danny Farrell tells me you know where it is.’
‘And you think I’m going to tell you?’
Annette produced one of her pistols from behind her back, but did not aim it. ‘I haven’t actually had to shoot one of you guys so far today. They all cracked under the threat, but you… I think you might actually make me blow holes in you.’
‘I’m not telling you where the lab is, so start shooting.’
‘Don’t think so.’ Annette handed her pistol back to her arming pod.
‘What?’
‘I’m really not into torture and bullets aren’t a great way to do it anyway. So, here’s the deal: you tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave you here for the maid to find in a couple of hours.’
‘That’s not much incentive to talk.’
Annette smiled. ‘You haven’t heard the second part. I owe some Frankies a favour. They’ve been bugging me to give them a friend of mine. She’s cute and blonde, and… Well, you’re blonde and you’ll probably bring a good price.’
‘You’re not gonna sell me for parts. If you won’t torture me–’
‘Oh, they won’t chop you up.’ Annette waved the idea away with a grin. ‘They can get way more out of trading you to one of the gangs in Manhattan, maybe further afield. Hey, maybe they’ll ship you out California way. All that sun will do wonders for you. Well, maybe not the dehydration, but we can’t have everything, right?’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘To save me having to sell a friend? Sure I would. What do you say?’
2/4/2117.
What Ashley said was that the lab was situated in the basement of a currently unoccupied office building in Sky City. Distribution was being run out of the offices at the back of the ground floor. There was a small underground car park – office workers in Sky City usually lived in Sky City and got to work via public transport – which had a loading dock. And Ashley went on at length about how there was no way Annette was going to get in there, not with the Sky Lords providing security along with the Frankies and Juicers who were producing the drug.
Truthfully, Ashley had looked like she thought she might be going a little far toward the end of the conversation. Like maybe giving away the lab’s defences had been a step too far. Whatever the case, she had not been lying: there were people all over the plaza outside the building who looked like they were probably Sky Lords. Going in the front door was probably not going to play out too well. The loading dock then.
There were no guards at the back of the building where the car park entrance was located. Having a couple of Sky Lords hanging out outside the ramp might have drawn attention. Heavy cloud was masking any light which might have come down from the night sky, making the street lights the only thing which might have revealed Annette’s black-clad form as she moved underground, and the lighting in the car park left a lot to be desired, creating more shadow than light. However, there were some good lamps mounted near all the staircases, up and down, and around the loading dock area. The latter also had a pair of guards, Sky Lords, but Annette’s infrared vision suggested that there was something off about one of them: his arms were too cool. Visually, he looked normal, but the heat distribution suggested high-quality cybernetic limbs.
Annette reached back to hand off her pistol and take one of her homing grenades. The two men were close enough; they were, typically for Sky Lords, not the most disciplined of guardians and they were chatting about something or other. They had assault rifles on them, but those were slung over one shoulder. Sneaking up to within the effective range of the grenade was easy enough. She locked the weapon to the man with the cybernetics and tossed it out of the shadows.
‘What the Hell is–’ The query, as one of the two noticed the little disc flying at them, was cut short by the detonation. The small explosion had its immediate target stumbling backward, his arms jerking and then falling limp. ‘Shit! Can’t see. What–’
Annette straightened from her crouch and took aim. Both of them were down before their vision was clear enough to see who was attacking them, but the noise of the explosion might have drawn more attention. And that was what Annette wanted. Turning, she bolted for a nearby door, through that and into a stairwell, and then down to the level below. Either this would be the lab or it would be a utility level she could cut through to bring her up in a flanking manoeuvre. You might have described her plan as a tactic if she had not been winging it all the way. She pushed through the door on the lower level and stopped. It was not a utility area.
It had been put there for storage by the looks of it, a fairly large, open area with columns supporting the building above. Someone had put up wooden batons and nailed plastic sheeting to them, breaking the floor up into smaller areas, each a makeshift operating theatre of sorts. Annette slipped into one of them and found a man there, lying unconscious on a gurney. He was hooked up to various monitors which said he was alive and probably sedated from the low heart rate. There seemed to be no damage to him, but the intention seemed obvious: the Frankies here were waiting to use him for spare parts.
It took Annette three tries to find Tina Clement-Bride. The monitors said she was alive and sedated, like the others. Unlike some, the Frankies had not started taking any major organs out of Tina – Annette had found one young man being kept alive by a machine having had his heart and lungs removed – but all was not well with the undercover cop. The Frankies, it seemed, had found a buyer for her eyes. The extraction had been careful, avoiding tissue damage; Tina’s eyelids were half-closed, sunken into the holes left behind.
Annette’s jaw clenched. Moving deliberately, she held her pistols to her back so that her pod could switch magazines. Indicators came up in her vision field: incendiary rounds loaded. Gillian had asked her to find Tina and she had, just a little too late. And the people in this place, no matter whatever else they were up to, were going to pay for everything they had done.
~~~
Making snakebite was still a moderately hands-on process. Some aspects of it had been automated, primarily the initial distillations, but the later stages were still fairly delicate and a matter of judgement. The last stage, cooking up the final product, required constant observation. The chemists who undertook that stage were watching for certain specific colour changes and then adjusting the temperature of the mixture, and every single one of them was part of the project to create a step-by-step process flowchart which would be used to build a machine to do it. Probably a machine in an armoured cabinet because if you got it wrong, it tended to blow up in your face.
For the one on duty tonight, it came as something of a shock when something slammed into the workbench under the big, glass solvent pot which he was just about to empty via a vac transfer. There was an explosion, glass shattered, and the man began screaming as hot glass and fragments of phosphor began to burn into his skin. The scream was cut off a second later as the contents of the flask erupted into flame.
Annette walked past the bench, oblivious to the flames, and raised her pistols. The man working on the reaction was not the only one in the lab, and the others fell as explosive rounds tore their chests open. Smoke rose from the wounds as the phosphor burned, tearing oxygen out of flesh. Annette ignored the smouldering bodies and kept going. These were Juicers and she had Frankies to hunt down.
Ahead of her, in the corridor beyond the lab, she could hear raised voices. There were more of them out there and it was time to go to work.
~~~
On the ground floor of the office building above the lab was a room which had been turned over to collaboration and bookkeeping. The Juicer was one of the pumped-
up bodybuilder types, there for his muscle rather than his brains. The Sky Lord was working on a degree in accountancy and she knew just what she was doing when it came to keeping records. The Franky just had natural talent: he had a head for numbers. For example, from memory, he could give you the current going rates for every organ in the human body.
They did not get involved in the stuff that went on downstairs, and someone else did the drug sales. They were there to count money, which there was plenty of. Body parts tended to sell for cash, generally the well-used, wrinkled kind which was hard to trace, though some people were rich enough that several thousand dollars just vanished into their overheads and they paid in bundles of notes, still in the wrappers. Snakebite, and a couple of other things the Lords had suggested might go down well with the youth market, always sold for cash. And when you were dealing with three independent gangs who all wanted their fair share, you had to make sure everything was carefully accounted for.
When the door opened, slamming against the wall, three heads turned to see who had made such an abrupt entrance. What they saw was Annette in her combat suit. Her normally carefully groomed hair was in disarray, her face was blackened by soot and what looked a lot like blood, and there seemed to be more of the latter making her suit glisten in places. Her blank eyes somehow made it hard to tell she was pissed off, and also seemed to make it worse. She raised her right-hand pistol and fired a round into the Juicer’s chest, tearing his ribcage open and dropping him on the spot to smoulder.
‘You two have exactly two seconds to get out of here before I blow your brains out,’ Annette said, her tone flat.
The Sky Lord glanced at her companion and then back at Annette, who did not seem to have any plans to step out of the only door. The Franky came to the same conclusion faster, picked up his chair, and tossed it through the window behind him before following it as fast as he could go. A second later, Annette was alone in the room with the smouldering corpse and all the money the gang members had been counting. Her left arm was partially numb from the laser wound in it and she ached all over. She probably had ten minutes at best before the LIPD responded to the broken window, but it was time enough to grab what she could.
Queens District.
Mickey sat close by making consoling noises as Annette eased herself out of her suit. There was some bruising under her ribs, but the worst wound was on her left bicep where a laser hit had managed to cut through to burn flesh. The suit had stopped most of it, but there was some deep-tissue damage.
‘It’ll heal,’ she said to Mickey. Mickey gave a bark of agreement. ‘And if it’s taking too long, there’s always a triage grenade. I’ve got cash for materials now. I just hope the LIPD got to Tina fast enough.’ Another bark, this time more one of encouragement. ‘You’re right, I’m sure they did. I didn’t find her fast enough, but I’m sure they will.’
Mickey tilted his head and Annette shook hers. For a dog, Mickey was ridiculously expressive. ‘Okay, so I shouldn’t be blaming myself, but I’m going to for now. It’s how I’m wired, okay?’
She could tell, just from the look he was giving her, that self-recrimination was going to be short or he would be having words with her. Getting to her feet, Annette started for the shower. She groaned. ‘The cash is probably going to be useful. I don’t think I’ll be working much tomorrow. I know it’s going to be Friday in the morning, but I’ve got limits. I need rest.’
Bark! Clearly, Mickey thought Annette pushed her limits far too much as it was.
~~~
The pain was blinding. Literally. All Annette got from her optical systems was a nauseating swirl of colours and she struggled through that to find her emergency injector. Having jabbed the thing into her thigh, she fell back onto the bed and waited for the numbness to set in.
A minute or so later, she felt the mattress shift and then a warm, furry body settle beside her. Mickey put his head on her arm and whimpered, and Annette had enough sensation of location left to reach out and scratch between his ears.
‘I’ll be okay,’ Annette said. ‘You know you’re not allowed on the bed.’ Mickey gave a soft whine in response and Annette rolled onto her side, wrapping an arm around her dog. The action sent a shock of pain through her head. ‘Just this once…’
~~~
When she woke up again, the pain was gone but her vision was still flaky. She could see, barely, but the image flickered and broke up whenever she moved. She managed to get a text message out to Sarah before collapsing back onto the bed with Mickey and shutting her eyes down.
Luckily, Sarah still had a key to Annette’s apartment from her time looking after Terri. She came rushing in and, even without seeing it, Annette could picture the concern on her face.
‘Are you okay?’ Sarah asked more or less immediately. ‘I got your message, but I wasn’t really sure it was from you. You usually spell better than that.’
‘I’m having some trouble with my optical systems,’ Annette replied. ‘Can’t see properly. Could you feed Mickey?’
‘Yeah, sure. What happened to your arm?’ Sarah’s voice was moving away to the kitchen area, but Mickey stayed right where he was beside Annette. Food was, apparently, less important than his mistress, which was good to know given how stomach-centric he tended to be.
‘I ran into someone with a laser pistol. Which reminds me, there’s a bag under the bed. Take some money out of it to cover your time.’
‘You don’t need to pay me to come over here when you’re sick.’
Annette smiled and was rather pleased that she was feeling well enough to do so. ‘Charge me BJ rates if you’re uncomfortable, but we’ve both got to eat and last night was reasonably lucrative.’
‘Oh? Come on, Mickey, food. She’ll still be there when you’ve eaten.’ Mickey, seeming reluctant about it, climbed off the bed. ‘How much did you get? This was the drug lab? Did you find the girl you were looking for?’
‘Don’t know, haven’t counted. Yes. Yes.’
There was a scraping sound and Sarah’s voice came from a point which suggested she was kneeling beside the bed. ‘Was she okay?’
‘The Frankies were running a chop shop out of the same building. Her eyes were gone, but she’ll live.’
‘Oh… Sorry.’
Annette felt the sinking feeling that came with failure again. ‘Yeah… Well, they paid for it. And I don’t just mean the money.’
‘Oh. Good. Hey, I think you made it into the papers. Well, not you, but the story. There was a headline on the Times when I went past the newsstand. Something like “Carnage at Sky City Drug Den.”’
‘Huh. Well, the LIPD aren’t breaking down my door, so I’m going to assume no one has tied it to me.’
‘The Lip couldn’t find their ass with both hands. You’ve got a little over sixteen thousand here.’
Annette raised an eyebrow. ‘That was quick.’
‘I’m not bad with numbers. Math, not so much, but numbers I can do.’
‘Sarah Donaldson, I suspect you of being smarter than you make out.’
Sarah giggled. ‘Oh yeah, I’m a hidden genius. When no one’s looking, I put my glasses on and solve physics equations.’
‘Uh-huh. How did you end up in the game anyway?’
‘Oh, well, I was born down in the Blackwater Community. My family were… are very religious and they really didn’t approve of this boy I fell for. We ran away together, got into the enclave, and ended up in Brooklyn. And that was kind of when I found out my parents were right. He joined the Tarantulas and he’d whore me out to his friends. One thing led to another and I ended up on Industrial Avenue.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Life sentence for murdering a cop. He’s in Queens Prison and I hope he stays there. When he was arrested, I took the opportunity to get out of Brooklyn. I mean, what I’m doing now isn’t much better, but…’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen Brooklyn. Why didn’t you go home?’
‘I wouldn’t have been welc
ome,’ Sarah replied flatly.
‘I seem to recall you saying something to Ted about families when we were on Coney Beach.’
‘Yes, I did, but this is different.’ There was a finality in the statement that at least suggested Annette should not press it further.
‘I’m feeling a bit better,’ Annette said. ‘So… You can go or make coffee.’
Sarah’s giggle returned; the girl could shift emotional gears very quickly, or seemed to be able to. ‘Am I still getting paid?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘In that case, coffee it is, but cover yourself up, will you? Otherwise I might have to charge you full rates.’
Annette located her sheet and pulled it up over her chest, and hoped her eyes would be functional soon. At least functional enough that she could read the diagnostics and find out what had gone wrong.
3/4/2117.
The Long Island Times still had the drug lab’s discovery as its lead story, but now with coverage of the Franky chop shop found beneath it. The Times was the main serious broadsheet among the various daily publications in the enclave and its coverage was fairly sober. The Sky City Tattler was another matter, going for far more lurid reporting which was, as far as Annette could tell, largely made up. The Tattler was popular largely due to its reputation for gossip and sensationalism, but also because it was cheaper than the Times.
Annette was flicking through the reports in both and finding nothing indicating that she had been seen when she noticed a familiar face coming down the avenue toward her. Gillian was walking a little faster and her expression was a little lighter. Annette knew why she was happier and why she was here this time.
‘I need to go back to my place for a few minutes,’ Annette said. ‘Mickey, you stay with Sarah.’
Sarah had, apparently, seen Gillian too. ‘See you shortly.’
Annette intercepted Gillian and led her through the alleys to her apartment block. They waited for more than greetings until they were inside and then Gillian seemed unable to contain herself further. ‘I owe you so much. I’d have come yesterday, but–’
Gunwitch: Rebirth Page 21