by Kai O'Connal
“It’s a slum.” Kyrie’s hands were on her weapons, but she held both of them beneath the level of the crates in the back of the truck. If there was trouble, she’d be ready for it—but there was no profit to advertising. Not until it paid, like when they’d shot their way through one shakedown, and it paid for word of their coming to shoot through the local nets and warn the next gang to stay the hell out of their way. “It’s been here for a century or more.”
“Surprised the buildings stood that long.” Pineapple was watching behind them.
“The rich bastards who live around here depend on the favelas for labor and cheap manufacture. Most of the low-level commerce that takes place in cities down here is done here.” She watched a shaved-headed man who watched her back. He carried a machete in one hand and made no attempt to hide it. The people around him offered a wide berth.
“And they don’t move out?”
“They don’t get paid that well.” If machete man made the wrong move … she clicked the safety off the Manhunter. It would be safer than spraying the crowd with the Ingram. “And it’s home to most of them. They don’t want to leave. It’s not like they’ve got Renraku next door, shining the arcology in their faces.”
“That’s crazy.”
“And flying thousands of miles to skip across a border, deal with a thousand fools with bows and arrows, all for a stupid map isn’t?” She risked a glance at the troll’s back. “Crazy only looks that way from the outside.”
“That’s different,” Pineapple said. “This is business.”
“So’s this.”
“Elijah.”
The mage looked up from the leaf he’d been examining. The truck had been idling for ten minutes, and the big diesel vibrated him to his joints. The leaf was from the jungle, but he’d have sworn he’d seen it vibrate out of frequency with the rest of the truck. It looked odd in the astral …
“Elijah—wake up!”
He blinked and looked up at Kyrie. She gestured with her chin. “We got trouble.”
He stood and looked where she’d indicated. His fingers and lips moved silently as he did, working the first charms of the stunball spell. There was nothing to see, just the throngs of itinerant humanity filling the smelly reaches of the São Paulo-Metropôle favela.
“What am I looking at?”
“The guy with the machete.”
Elijah found the man she’d indicated. He was staring at them, tapping the mud-covered—at least I hope it’s mud—blade against the side of his knee. He wore dingy brown dungarees and, unless he was different from everyone else, sandals. His homespun shirt was off-white, as if it’d been white to begin with, but suffered from months of sweat and dribbled food and never being washed. His hair was shaved, but the shadow of his scalp told Elijah he was balding regardless.
“I don’t think we need to worry about him.” Releasing his spell, Elijah touched the small pistol beneath his armpit. “I think we’ll see him coming, yes?”
“It’s not him I’m worried about,” Kyrie muttered. “It’s who he works for.”
“You’re not going all ‘Hualpa-is-out-to-get-us’ again, are you?”
“No, I’m going ‘he’s-probably-the-point-man-for-a-drug-cartel-or-kidnap-syndicate.’” She glared at him. “And I’d rather not have Pineapple unload on the whole market, you know?”
The troll laughed. “I hit what I aim at,” he said. “No worries.”
“And the people behind what you aim at?” Kyrie ducked her chin toward the crate containing his Panther assault cannon. “There’s a lot of people out there just trying to get through their day.”
Elijah let go of his pistol. “As we’re just trying to get through ours.” He blinked his mesh active.
Elijah frowned and stepped onto a crate to look forward, over the truck’s cab. The street in front of them was awash with metahumanity, orks and trolls and humans all in various states of dress and, to his eyes at least, undress. They clutched crates and boxes and bicycles, and a few ganger-types ran the throttles of their motorcycles up to scream over the hum of the crowd, sending wavy rooster tails of blue exhaust into the air.
Pineapple rumbled low in his throat. “Maybe I should get off and clear the way, hey?”
Elijah sucked air through his teeth. “No.” He turned back around. “We have time. We can wait it out.”
Another one of the favela scum brushed against her shoulder, and Christiana Bizet bit back her snarl. The sound that escaped between her tusks was more of a sigh than a snarl, but Hearn looked back at her nonetheless.
“How much longer?” she asked.
“That’s them.” Hearn pointed to the solid-looking truck. “They look like a handful, don’t they? I don’t like the look in that troll’s eyes.” He shrugged. “It’ll be someone else’s problem for now.”
Bizet leaned around the human’s shoulder, breathing between her tusks. Hearn didn’t blame her—the smell would get to anyone who hadn’t lived here for a decade or so.
The truck was stopped in the crowd. Any lesser vehicle would have been swarmed by now, but the people were obviously afraid of the troll perched in the back. Hearn looked down the boulevard. Then he smiled. Two blinks called up an ARO, and he picked a number from the list that appeared on his AR.
“Closing in,” he said. “You sure you want the interception now?”
Tempest nodded gravely. “They’re getting close. Time to stop them before they get ahead of us.”
“All right. Sending it in now.” He blinked again, then waved a finger. With that, the call was over, and the order for the intercept was given.
He shook his head. He hadn’t imagined he would have come out of Chicago with an alliance with the Alephs, but that’s where the troll had maneuvered things. Strange bedfellows and all.
It helped that the Alephs seemed to have no idea what Tempest intended to do once he was certain where the map was.
“Let’s get a drink and wait,” he said, and started walking.
Bizet followed. “For what?”
“For the next step in getting us home.”
Elijah blinked the text off his AR and set the leaf down again. Kyrie stood alongside the stack of crates, her Manhunter drawn and held down along her leg. He sighed and levered himself upright.
Machete-man was coming toward the truck, and Elijah had to admit it looked intentional. He’s staring at Pineapple. Maybe I should—he looked at the troll and saw him already grinning at the approaching man—or maybe not. The man with the machete grinned back, showing no fear whatsoever. Uh-oh.
Elijah twisted and looked down at the truck’s cab. Leung was safely inside with Cao, but it was beneath probability that someone knew what they were doing. It had to be a local, just trying to get into the new folks’ mesh and see what there was to steal.
Elijah spun around. Kyrie was watching the rear of the truck, looking back the way they’d come. Her Manhunter was tapping gently against her thigh. He didn’t see what she was watching, but there were hundreds of people back there…
“Come on, baby…” Pineapple murmured. His voice sounded like rocks rubbing together.
Elijah rubbed his fingers against each other, surprised to find his palms were sweaty. Not the oh-my-god-it’s-hot-here sweaty he’d been dealing with all along, but the surprise-here’s-something-you-didn’t-expect sweaty. He sat down, centered himself, and went for a walk on the astral.
And came right back.
Bizet and Hearn sat in rust-s
tained, rickety chairs with bad thatch seats, sipping bottled beer they’d been careful to ensure was sealed when they bought it. Hearn had his back to the truck. He was watching Bizet, who was watching the truck while she ran her fingertip around the lip of her bottle. Condensation ran down the sides.
“Anything?” Hearn asked. Bizet looked at him.
He was sunburned. He spent most of his time in Seattle, and he did most of his work at night. Sunlight wasn’t something he saw frequently. What skin of his was showing was red except where his clothes pulled to the side. There it was pasty-white. His blond hair was cut short on the sides and hung long on the top, and he wore mirrored sunglasses because the brightness of Metropôle blinded him every time he took them off.
“It’s starting,” she said.
The first gunshot—a pistol—sent everyone scurrying for cover.
It was followed by more.
“You think?” Pineapple asked.
The truck’s engine revved. No one moved. The horn, a big foghorn-sounding job, honked. A man in his twenties, wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt, turned around and gave the armored windscreen the finger.
“Watch what you shoot at,” Kyrie said. “No one will bother us if we don’t shoot up the crowd.”
“And if they shoot up the crowd?”
“We’ll get attention.”
Kyrie’s pistol cracked.
Elijah’s eyes opened.
“All right!” Pineapple yelled. His hand came up, filled with submachine gun.
“Damn it,” Elijah whispered.
The Manhunter’s round flew true, taking the lead ork between the eyes. Her face registered the first hint of shock before she fell. The black-bodied shotgun fell to the street next to her body as the crowd erupted in the high-pitched screaming of civilians who didn’t want to be shot next.
The Manhunter chambered its next round, and Kyrie’s eyes tracked back and forth while her AR communed with the smartgun circuitry and she pondered engaging her adept’s reflexes. Not yet …
Pineapple opened up with his submachine gun. More screams.
The truck jerked forward a centimeter. The people in front of it yelped again, more afraid of being crushed by the thick, solid-rubber tires than of being shot. The first bullets of the bad guys’ return fire sparked off the truck’s armored side.
Kyrie tracked right, aiming at a dwarf half-crouched behind a tabletop, rifle leveled. It was an old surplus assault rifle, and he was squeezing off rounds like a metronome in single-shot. His head was shaved, except for a jagged path of dirty black hair along the left side of his head.
Her second bullet took him in the shoulder, spinning him back and out of sight.
More bullets hit the truck. Pineapple laughed, his guffaws suddenly louder as his gun ran dry and he dropped it, the whole gun instead of just the empty magazine, and pulled his shotgun from near his knees. He raised it—
—Kyrie looked—
No! No no no the people not the people he’s got ten people around him the shot will spread—
—BOOM—
The man with the machete flew backward, his chest a welter of gore. Pineapple racked the slide and chambered another slug. The people who’d been crouched around the dead man were covered in blood, but they weren’t injured.
—BOOM—
Kyrie looked back toward the rear. Another man, this one a dingy human with impossibly scrawny arms, had picked up the dwarf’s rifle and was firing at the truck like hitting it would mean his salvation. She raised her pistol, focusing the smartgun’s aim in her AR—
—the truck lurched into motion as Cao found a path—
—she fired—
—the bullet took him in the arm instead of the head. He screamed—silent at that distance with so much noise already but she saw his mouth gape—and shot him through the tonsils.
More bullets clanged off their armor as Cao accelerated. The people in the way, who’d been happy to block a stopped truck’s passage a minute ago, scurried to clear the way now that a multi-ton crushing machine was rolling toward them.
Pineapple came back next to her, his massive hip smashing her into a crate hard enough that she wondered if she was bleeding over her hip. His shotgun banged out two more slugs before it clicked empty.
Cao made a turn and they were out of the line of fire.
They weren’t following.
Bizet had twisted around in her chair to watch. Hearn looked past her, watching the professional way the woman in the samurai outfit fired. He heard the boom of the troll’s big shotgun, but the lack of screaming meant he was using slugs instead of flechettes.
“There they go,” Bizet said as the truck rumbled into motion. People scurried on their hands and knees out of its way. She looked back at Hearn. “Should we …”
“We should not.” Hearn was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped across his stomach, watching. His AR was recording it all, but he liked to watch it in realtime, too.
“But—”
“Shut up.”
Bizet shut up.
The truck made a turn and disappeared around the corner. The massive, solid-rubber tires crushed a vendor’s stand into a rattan throw rug before it went. The squat dwarf vendor cowered against the side of the building, but he retained enough presence of mind to shake his fist at the truck.
Hearn toggled a message window open on his AR and entered an address. He keyed a few words and hit send.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bullets spanging off the side of the thin sheet-metal building beside them sent Kyrie ducking down between the crates, but Pineapple bellowed a curse and dug in his pocket. Pulling a small flash-bang from his cargo pocket, he thumbed it active. His massive arm shot out, launching it back the way they’d come just before Cao made the turn. The crack and star-white light strobed against the far wall.
“Okay,” he said, turning and squatting to face Kyrie, “I admit it. They’re organized. No one—not even this shithole—can hate us this much.” He glanced both ways, looking up at the rooftops. An ambusher could line the rooftops with men with assault rifles and piss a whole lot of bad day down on them. She watched the same potential situation behind them. It would only take one anti-vehicle rocket up their ass.
Twenty hours. Twenty hours since they’d traded the pygmies’ jungle for the urban one. São Paulo was behind them. They’d moved as best they could, using the former APC’s bulk to shove themselves through the slums and streets of the sprawl. It seemed like there was a gang of thugs waiting for them every time traffic slowed. Waiting to try to claim Kyrie for the “transit tax.” Waiting to claim that Pineapple insulted them. Waiting to claim they needed some stupid toll.
Elijah had paid the first couple gangs off, but by the fourth group Leung put his foot down. “I don’t have the access to steal all this cred back,” he’d told the mage. “Stop spending our pay.”
Most of them had backed down when Pineapple waved his Panther at them. Some of them hadn’t tried to barter first—like the last group, six orks on motorcycles. They’d just rode up alongside and sprayed the armored windows with machine pistol rounds. As i
f an APC wouldn’t have plex thick enough to stop little pistol bullets. Kyrie had taken two on her side down with her Ingram—leather didn’t stop submachine gun bullets—but Pineapple had just leaned over with arms longer than most people expected, picked one of the gangers up by the neck, and tossed him under the wheels of the motorcycle behind. The ensuing pileup had been a thing of beauty.
“Needed a stretch,” he’d said.
Kyrie looked around.
The truck crested a small rise and started down a hill. For a second they were at the high point, and Kyrie risked standing up to take a look around. The terrain was hilly, with mountains up the side and in the distance. In the jungle, if they’d been able to see that far, those hills would have been covered with trees and fronds and a thousand other varieties of flora more beautiful than could be described.
Here the hills were covered with color, but it was the rust-stained mix of blues, oranges, and yellows of industrial steel. Converted cargo containers—sheet metals of different provenances—whatever materials that could be scrounged, sold, or stolen had been combined to make a solid sea of shanty-style housing. She’d thought the shanties had gone on forever in Manaus.
Manaus was nothing.
The Rocinha was large beyond belief, almost beyond description. It covered the land as far as she could see, shadowed by clouds on one side and shining in the sun on the other.
Pineapple surged upward behind her. “I was wrong about Posadas.”
Kyrie sent a question mark on his AR.
“This is a shithole.”
The truck shuddered into a turn down an alley and stopped. The driver side door slid open and Cao dropped out, her cowl falling back as she put her hands far over her head and stretched. Kyrie heard the sinews in her shoulders and neck pop and crackle. Her gray skin was sheened with sweat, but the tiniest of grins dimpled her cheeks.