Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  His eyes scanned around, saw the others on their run. No time to glance back at the target; Ubi, the last man, would count the bodies.

  The updraft from a rooftop fire gave him another couple of feet of height. Everything counted. He angled slightly upwards, trying to exchange momentum for more height. Scanning for threats. You couldn’t spot a sniper, but you could spot other airbornes. The predators liked to fly high and in formation, because they could. At this point Hammer wasn’t up for an air-to-air fight, or a pursuit. Not with his height and that arrow through his wing. Not against some bastard in an ultralight.

  A brief check of his wings: oh shit. Something had gone through the other side too, a bit of shrapnel or a musket ball. It had made a small rip. Small rips had a nasty tendency to become big rips.

  The Javitz outtake was about a hundred and twenty yards away, in the light of the massive light-studded arkscrapers. He was still losing height, about thirty feet above the rooftops. Gaining a little with minor updrafts, but on balance losing.

  Without the injuries he’d make it to the outtake, no probs. With them it was dicier. But everything was dicey. Eventually your time would come. Statistically Hammer’s should have long ago.

  The Javitz scraper was about average sized for an arcology-skyscraper, six hundred yards high. It was in the middle of high-building country, which meant gangland. The tenements occupied lower buildings, generally three- and four-story ones. But the outtakes were only a couple of stories off the ground, and – thank God – there was clear line of sight to them.

  Javitz was part of the big arkscraper network, but it stood on its own. Skyways led to the big clusters – Soho, the Midtowns, Lower and Upper East and West Sides, the Downtown ones. You could walk from Battery Park to Harlem or the Bronx and be indoors the entire way. For that matter, there were enclosed bridges and tunnelways under the Hudson and East Rivers, from Manhattan to Long Island and Jersey.

  Most gangers didn’t believe in the tunnelways because they’d never seen them. Most gangers, even airbornes, were morons who didn’t think beyond the next fight, the next meal or the next fuck. Hammer read books, listened to radio, had watched TV. A guy he ran into occasionally liked to call him ‘Professor’.

  The outtake was there now. Warm air blasted up out of the scraper from a dozen large vents, and Hammer was so low that it almost hurt. He began circling the massive arkscraper slowly, enjoying the beautiful, beautiful height. He could go up to six hundred feet on these drafts if he wanted to. A thousand feet.

  The outtakes had something to do with air-conditioning. From the limited amount Hammer had been able to figure out, making air cold meant making other air hot, and you had to pump that other air out of the building somehow. Not only was the outtake air hot, but it was blasted upwards by powerful fans. Manhattan had more than two hundred arkscrapers; updrafts were all over the city. You could fly indefinitely if you knew where they were.

  The Javitz Building itself was dark-blue glass, its footprint a full block but the tower itself only half of that. Skyways connected it to its immediate neighbors. A long branching skyway two hundred feet above the ground led west, where it connected with the wide Western Skyway between Midtown and the Lower West Side. Gleaming steel stilts propped the Western Skyway up at intervals. There were higher ones above that, higher than you usually flew, all the way up the arkscrapers connecting them.

  You could see people on the skyways, walking fast. Sometimes they stood on flat conveyor belts. Well-dressed people, people with luxuries that on the streets were only rumor. People who weren’t gangers or tennies. People, he imagined, who had all the time in the world to study.

  Hammer envied them like hell, but tried hard not to think about it.

  * * *

  Home was the roof and the top story of a decaying twelve-story building on East Thirty-Sixth between Park and Lexington. A century ago, before the civilized people and the money had moved to the arkscrapers, it had been offices. Immediately across East Thirty-Sixth was the Lewiston ark, and two skyways crossed the building about ninety and two hundred feet above the rooftop. Running lights glowed at five-foot intervals along the lengths of the skyways; even at night, the rooftop was never dark. Through most mornings they were in the shadow of the three-hundred-story buildings of the United Nations South cluster, whose multicolored lights looked down across the Lower East Side now.

  The Lewiston had a sprawling five-story-high lower level that encompassed the whole block. On the roof of that level were outtakes that could take you up to eight hundred feet in ten minutes.

  Landing was always sticky. The L-shaped building at least had space, but overshooting could kill you easily. You lost height, released your feet from the catch where you normally left them. That cost you aerodynamics and angled the wing downwards. In a bad wind it could be really dangerous. The ground was a hundred and ten feet below. If you were imaginative, like Hammer, then you imagined yourself overshooting with your harness loose. Splatter. Or unharnessing too soon. Splatter.

  The others landed first. Hammer waited, flying two slow and careful circles around the big scraper. Then he went in. His thin-soled sneakers touched the rough concrete rooftop and he angled the glider down, further down. A couple of the grounders ran to help him. They tied his glider securely down with a chain, someone handing him a plastic bottle of hot coffee.

  “How’d it go?” asked Bubs. She was a late-teens girl who’d somehow acquired a Southern accent. For a while she’d been Hammer’s bedpartner, before he gave her off to Ubi.

  “Fine,” Hammer said. He looked around at his five airbornes. He himself was six-one, wiry rather than muscular. His skin was brown; like everyone on the streets, his ancestry was mixed and unknown. His cheekbones were high and intelligent hazel eyes looked out through the goggles he now pushed up to his forehead. He wore sockless sneakers, tight shorts and a singlet, and sheathed on his left leg was a nine-inch fighting blade that had killed.

  Ubi and Blue were half-brothers. Ubi was a black man, twenty-three, four years older than his younger brother Blue. Blue was noticeably lighter-skinned. C-Bill was nineteen, with a slim face and skin of a brown that implied Asian blood somewhere. His lean face had been disfigured by a very nasty scar that ran from his left eye down to the corner of his mouth. Donner was sixteen, small, mostly black, with a perpetual wise-ass smirk.

  Parasite was the youngest. He was fourteen and pasty blond white, an ambitious little brat who’d talked his way up from the gangs who occupied the middle floors of this building. All the talk in the world wouldn’t have brought him up if he hadn’t been able to furnish a glider. He’d managed to somehow burgle one of the vendors in the Times Square marketplace, getting out with enough electronics to buy his wings. It was a story he told endlessly. At fourteen with barely two years in the air, he didn’t have a lot of good war stories.

  Neither did Hammer, for that matter. Good war stories happened when someone screwed up. He tried not to screw up.

  Lizard had been the old gang leader. Three years ago he’d gone out on a job and hadn’t come back. Prentiss, a big muscular sadist, had been Lizard’s number two. He’d been home on the night of that raid because of damage taken to his wings the night earlier.

  Hammer had stayed home that night voluntarily.

  “Those tactics are going to get a lot of people killed. Especially if we do them two nights running on the same target,” Hammer had said. Refusing to go. Mutiny.

  There’d been an argument. When six airbornes had gone out and two had returned, Prentiss had blamed Hammer.

  “If you hadn’t fucked up,” the big ganger had snarled, “if you’d obeyed your leader, the operation would have succeeded and Lizard’d be alive.”

  Hammer had expected a fight when Lizard got back anyway. He’d been too insubordinate and he’d gotten the feeling the boss was getting sick of him. It would have been knives and fists – probably not to the death, but Lizard wouldn’t have been satisfied until he’d esta
blished complete dominance.

  So, heart beating in his throat, Hammer had told Prentiss that the gang leader had died by Darwin. That Prentiss was no smarter than Lizard and therefore he, Hammer the geek who did have a brain, was taking charge of the gang. An apology to the new chief of Hammer’s Hawks would be in order, right about now.

  Prentiss had opened his mouth, but from the look on his face he hadn’t exactly been about to apologize.

  Prentiss had been a big guy, six-three and far more muscular than an airborne should be. In a fair fight Hammer’s chances would have been somewhere between shit and zip. He’d have killed Hammer, so Hammer had struck first.

  A bit of brick, scooped up and thrown hard at Prentiss, had nailed him right in the temple. Stunned him for a moment. That had been enough time to grab the big fucker by his neck. Punch hard in the solar plexus with his left fist and push-walk him the several yards over to the edge of the building.

  The concrete lip was only a couple of feet high, not quite reaching Prentiss’ waist. One good push and Prentiss’ center of gravity had crossed to the wrong side of the rail. Almost before the putative gang leader had realized what had happened, he’d been over the edge.

  Hammer’d heard the diminishing scream. Been too far up to hear the final splatter. Only cold-blooded kill he’d ever made. It still made him sick sometimes.

  Wrongly, he thought now, And that’s part of my problem with this life. I’m too fucking sensitive.

  “So how’d tonight go?” the grounder who was Parasite’s regular lay asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Hammer. “How did tonight go?” he asked Ubi. Ubi had been tail-end Charlie.

  “Place was on fire. I counted three dead, minimum. Maybe a couple more.”

  “We should’ve taken that light down first,” said Parasite. “Maybe set up a distraction down below. If they hadn’t spotted us…”

  Hammer smiled faintly. Ubi’s girl, Santos, who Hammer had walked on six months ago, gave the gang leader a look of – compassion? Incomprehension?

  An inferior mind trying to understand a superior one. That’s why Hammer had walked. She could fuck, and sew up a glider. But she couldn’t think, and Hammer had been starting to.

  “Maybe,” Hammer said. That was one of the things he’d been thinking about.

  Mostly streeters hated airbornes. They were almost unimaginably rich by comparison and virtually untouchable by those stuck on the ground. The hatred was returned as contempt. Streeters survived by eating rats and salvaging garbage. Airbornes were valiant mercenaries.

  Back to practical matters.

  “Anyone take more damage than I did?” he asked. The others had seen Hammer as he landed.

  “Almost lost my rear-left strut,” C-Bill said. Shuddering slightly. “An arrow, I think, or maybe a bullet. Structural damage, about ten feet out. Felt it almost break. It’s why I wasn’t pushing too hard.”

  “Think I got hit by a rock,” Parasite said. He touched his ribs. “Hard. Don’t think anything’s broken, though.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Five heads shook.

  “Santos?”

  Santos was the eldest of the grounders. She was about twenty-three, dark-skinned and very good-looking. She’d been Lizard’s, with Prentiss on the side, before those two had both died inside about three hours. Hammer had inherited her along with command of the gang. He’d quit with her at around the same time he’d quit with Bubs, quit sex altogether.

  She wasn’t quite as smart as Bubs and every so-often she made a big deal about how much she’d be making in a whorehouse. She knew repair, though, and could do chemical miracles with plastics and soldering. She was a useful chief grounder, even if Hammer knew she didn’t know an iota of the theory behind what she did with the chemicals.

  “We can probably fix it ourselves. Should I take a look at the strut?”

  “I want everyone to be fully airborne tomorrow,” Hammer ordered.

  “What, you got us another contract?” asked Ubi.

  “Not yet. But we might get another one – I think we did a decent job tonight. If not, target and physics training with rocks.”

  We’re a two-bit outfit, thought Hammer. Six guys – average-sized, nothing special. Maybe a bit better on the bomb-aiming. Maybe a bit smarter. Not enough resources to capitalize on either.

  Maybe that would change.

  “Anything else?”

  “You gotta get us some booze,” said Santos. “Not that cheap radiator shit, either.”

  “Anything important?”

  Silence, except for an angry snort from Santos.

  “Bring the gliders under cover then, and it’s off,” said Hammer. “Santos, I want all possible repairs done by midday. You can’t do it, tell me.”

  There were nods.

  Hammer took out his wallet and passed each of the fliers a hundred, then gave Santos two. She hated him, but she did a good job. He could live with people hating him if they weren’t a threat to his life. He couldn’t live with incompetence. Santos was very, very competent.

  “Good work, people,” he said. “Let’s drink.”

  * * *

  The gliders didn’t quite have a hangar. They were chained in an improvised tent made of hard plastic sheeting so that the UV rays couldn’t get them. Extended sunlight would melt the thin, stretched-plastic wings.

  On the top floor, lights were on in windows. Parts of the building, parts of the floor, were structurally unsound and dangerous to enter. The center rooms were fine, though. The stairs up had been collapsed with nitroglycerin. At least three different streetgangs lived in the building. Sometimes they fought each other. Sometimes outsiders attacked them, although that was rare. Occasionally they got the idea that attacking the airbornes on the top floor might result in good loot. An important part of Hammer’s job as gang leader was making sure the streeters understood how suicidal that idea would actually be in practice.

  That was the going wisdom, anyway. You kept control of your streeters by raw fear. It was what Lizard had always done, and his predecessors.

  And those guys were stupid, Hammer thought, as he paced back and forth along the roof with a plastic glass in his hand. The glass contained some kind of fermented alcohol. He was used to the vile taste, but tonight he didn’t feel like drinking.

  Tonight he was too agitated to drink. Too discontent. Too bored.

  Hammer had changed Lizard’s policy early on. Rule-by-fear worked, but it wasn’t anything you could build on. He’d given the streeters booze and food from time to time, but you had to be careful with that. Didn’t want to imply fear or weakness on his own end. You just wanted a good relationship.

  He walked along the edge of the roof on the side away from the Lewiston arkscraper, looking down at the infinite darkness below. It wasn’t quite darkness. Starlight and scraper-light made things dimly visible. But at the bottom, the shadows completely eclipsed the light.

  So we did another successful raid. How many more do I have left?

  There was a risk in every raid, of course. There was risk in everything. What was bad was pointless risk. He needed a bigger plan. His discontent was only increasing.

  Get a ticket in the Lottery. Move up in the world.

  Except that that was bullshit. He knew how stupid the idea was intellectually, but his gut said that the Lottery was for tenement-trash pussies. Gangers fought their way up, like James Wolf had.

  Wolf had been a great streetganger decades ago. He’d been born in the morass like every other ganger, not knowing his father and with a mom who didn’t care. The stories, probably five times exaggerated, said he’d killed a hundred people by the time he lost his virginity at ten.

  He’d risen to rule a streetgang empire in the Bronx, then somehow found his way into the Army. He’d gone over to Africa, and what had happened there was really legend. The stories said he’d become an officer; won medals, promotions and loot.

  The stories could never agree on what had happe
ned to him after that. Some said he’d died a heroic death in Africa. Others said he’d retired to luxury in the arkscrapers. Some said that he’d returned to the streets and wandered around as a penniless old sensei, ancient but still hard, and willing to impart his combat wisdom to those few chosen streeters he found worthy. Some said he’d become a sewerganger and still predated from down there as a dark boogeyman, killing.

  Death. It’s always death.

  Death hadn’t built the scrapers, had it? Or the rumored communities of sealed luxury between Bronx and Boston. The spaceships above, the colonies on Mars, Venus, and the Moon – had primitive fighting produced them? No. Skill and intelligence had.

  The only skills to be rewarded out here are the skills of creating death. The only way to rise is by violence.

  Hammer looked down at the street. He thought he glimpsed shadows. Bigger than rats, but really no different. Streeters running from the dumps with armloads of loot, some to be eaten and some to be sold. The arkscrapers dumped their prodigious quantities of trash directly onto the streets, where it was soon consumed. Everything had value on the streets.

  Everything except life.

  Sure, there was low-level industry down here. The tenements, who bought most of the garbage that the streeters took, turned it back into raw materials that they sold to each other and the arkscrapers. That was how technology got onto the streets, although the arks didn’t sell weapons. Those and explosives had to be manufactured locally. Good weapons were rare. They couldn’t easily be manufactured in the tenements because there wasn’t much capability down there. It was why street nitroglycerin was so unreliable; the arkies would sell the precursor chemicals but you had to mix them yourself, which was hard.

  Growing up, he’d had a small portable TV. He’d been able to watch the scraper news broadcasts, their music, some of their talk shows and conversations. The educational programs, which were part of how he’d learned to read. Lizard had stolen that when he’d become gang leader, when Hammer was seventeen. He’d been afraid for a while to get a new one. Since then his tastes had turned to books, anyway.