by Mark Ellis
Leaning over the narrow lanes, the top stories of buildings pushed out their rickety wooden loggias and duraplast balconies. Most structures had been built to serve as laborers’ quarters when the Enclaves, the Administrative Monolith and the walls were erected.
The streets were crowded with people, lean, hard-eyed, hard-faced people who gave way when they saw the approach of the Magistrates. Most of them were courteous and deferential. They had to be.
As it was Boon’s first visit to the Pits, Kane and Grant conducted something of a walking tour, allowing him to absorb its peculiar, alien flavour. They pointed out the spy-eye stations, which transmitted video images of Pit activities to Intel. Boon acted distracted, nervous and jumpy until Grant relented and told him that Guana Teague was a powerless, fat fool who on his bravest day wouldn’t dare make eye contact with a Magistrate.
“Thought so,” said Boon, relief evident in his voice. “I didn’t really believe that body-parts story.”
“Yeah,” Kane said dryly. “We could tell you were only playing along with us.”
The narrow streets were of hard brown earth, guttered down the centre for drainage. A few lanes were cobbled, and all were thick with mud and the droppings of mules, horses and cattle. However, those pedestrian hazards didn’t prevent people from running, skipping or dancing. They passed a blind girl who danced in the muck, to the music of harp, fife and drum, her feet shod in filthy slippers.
They saw an elderly man wearing a dented stovepipe hat and threadbare frock coat selling what looked like mummified human hands from an open box. The placard around his neck read Hands Of Glory Special. Ward Off Rad Cancer, Control Stress, Nourishing For The Weak Spirit.
It occurred to Kane again there was more difference than he had been taught between the high-towers and the Pit dwellers. True, the people in the Enclaves were superior to those down below, but it was an artificially imposed superiority. He, Grant and even Boon were trained to serve an arbitrary order, given direction and set upon an unwavering path in life. The people in the Pits simply existed moment to moment, quarrelling, loving, laughing, crying and being completely human.
From the open door of a saloon, they smelled wine and burning incense, and Kane swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Beyond the louvered, bat-winged doors, a piano banged out a tinny, unfamiliar tune, and he saw the gaming tables inside.
An astonishingly short man, barely three feet tall, came flying out between the doors. He was followed an instant later by a begrimed outrunner who gripped the short man by the collar and the seat of his pants.
“Don’t come back in here no more, mutie whoreson,” the man said, his words slurred as he catapulted the dwarf through the air. He landed face-first in a puddle, splashing Grant’s boots and the hem of his coat.
The outrunner’s stumpy teeth were bared in a ferocious grimace. Then, as his eyes lifted from the street and took in the sight of the three black-and-grey-clad men standing there, the grimace turned into an open-mouthed expression of terror. He mumbled incoherently and stepped back, trying to sidle back into the saloon.
“Freeze!” roared Grant, using the well-practiced tone of intimidation and power. Smoke poured out of his mouth, giving him the aspect of an enraged ebony dragon.
The outrunner froze, his feet rooted to the spot.
To Boon, Grant directed, “Check him.”
Boon moved forward, but Kane restrained him with a hand. “No. Make him come to you.”
Taking the scanner from his pocket, the young man shrilled, “Get your slagging ass over here, slagger!”
The outrunner weaved down the steps of the saloon, peeling back the cuff of his shirtsleeve. At the same moment, the mud-covered dwarf, looking like a beetle fished out of a cesspool, launched himself from the puddle, voicing a bass howl of rage. The bristly crown of his head barely topped the outrunner’s groin, and that’s where he sank his teeth.
Screaming, the Outrunner whirled in a semicircle, and the dwarf whirled with him, his tiny feet completely leaving the ground, his face pressed tightly against the man’s pelvis.
The dwarf’s feet slapped the scanner out of Boon’s hand, and he shouted angrily, wordlessly. His right hand tensed reflexively, but the edge of Kane’s hand chopped down hard against the Kevlar sleeve just as the Sin Eater filled Boon’s hand.
The gun roared, spit flame, and three rounds ploughed into the street, sending up geysers of watery muck. Instantly, as if a giant bell jar had been dropped over the area, all sound and movement halted. The dwarf’s jaws opened, and he alighted silently on the street. The piano stopped tinkling, and the murmur of laughing voices fell still.
Boon glanced first at the dwarf, then at the outrunner, then at Kane.
“Leather it,” Kane said around the cigar his mouth.
“He assaulted a Magistrate.” The outraged words tumbled from Boon’s lips. “Fucking outrunner and mutie interfered with a Magistrate, and they got to pay the fucking price!”
In a low, calm tone, Kane repeated, “Leather it.”
Slowly, reluctantly Boon shoved the Sin Eater back into its spring-loaded holster.
“Pick up the scanner,” Kane said quietly. “Check ’em.”
Face flushed with rage and shame, Boon plucked the device from the mud and, without wiping it off, grabbed the outrunner roughly by his proffered right arm. He stood motionless as Boon ran the sensor prongs over the flesh of his forearm, right below the elbow joint. The scanner emitted a clear, chiming signal, indicating a positive registration.
Boon flung the man’s arm away as though it exuded a noxious odour. He fixed his dark-lensed eyes on the muddy dwarf. “No need to scan this little mutie bastard. Know his chip is bogus.”
“Check him.” Kane bit out the words.
The small man extended his bared arm, and Boon waved the scanner over it. When he heard the positive tone, he repeated the process, with the same result. His face locked in a tight, hard mask of disappointment.
Removing the cigar from his mouth, Kane gestured with it toward the two Pit dwellers. “Go.”
The tall outrunner and the little man obediently backed up, and then pushed their way into the saloon. Kane and Grant turned away and began walking. After a moment’s hesitation, Boon caught up with them.
“I could have sworn that little—”
Grant cut him off. “It’s a condition called achondroplasia. Some kind of congenital trait common among outrunners born near hellzones. He’s a dwarf, not a mutie.”
“But that guy called him—”
It was Kane’s turn to interrupt. “An insult made in the heat of anger. Like a preNuke racial slur. Both of them were drunk and both of them are probably apologizing to each other right now.”
Grimly Boon declared, “Dwarf, mutie, drunk or sober, he assaulted a Magistrate.”
“An accident,” said Grant. “You’ll see and hear a lot of things in the Pits. Ninety-nine percent of the time, none of it means anything.”
“What about that other one percent?” Boon sounded a little calmer now.
“You’ll learn to recognize the one-percents,” replied Kane. “If you don’t, you’re dead.”
Boon shook his head. “Seems safer just to flash-blast this whole fucking place, send ’em back where they came from.”
“Ah,” said Grant, trying unsuccessfully to blow a smoke ring, “then who’ll clean the floors, fix the sewers, till the fields and wipe the collective asses of all of us in the high-towers?”
Boon didn’t answer.
For the remainder of the afternoon, they continued on Pit patrol. Boon decided to make something of a game out of it. At first, he checked the ID chips of every third person he saw, then of every man over the age of fifty, then of every female over puberty. Kane and Grant picked up food from street vendors, ate and drank and smoked their cigars and watched him. They figure
d sooner or later, Boon would sicken of it and quit. He didn’t. The sun began sinking behind the walls, washing the streets in a purple grey dusk.
“This is ridiculous,” snapped Kane as Boon made another female inspection. “He’s checked at least a hundred people so far and come up blank each time.”
“Maybe he’s on the prowl for that one percent you told him about,” Grant replied. “The law of averages. There’s got to be one bogus chip out of a couple of hundred.”
“And he’s likely to flash-blast the poor bastard on the spot.”
“Yeah, like you never itched for the opportunity to sling around lead. Like the time when you thought you had a Roamer cornered in a gully and blew the head off a cactus. Spent a week picking needles out of your face.”
“That was twelve years ago. Why do you keep reminding me of those things?”
“I’m your partner and your elder. I’m supposed to remind you of those things.”
Kane checked his wrist chron. “About two hours till shift change. A half an hour to get back to the division, a half to fill out the reports and another half for busywork. Then we can go home.”
“You’re half an hour short,” observed Grant.
“Okay, half an hour to walk back to the compound. “Kane took the cigar out of his mouth and shouted, “Boon! Enough for the day!”
Boon didn’t look up from the arm he was inspecting. The arm was attached to a small young woman who might have been sixteen years old or twenty-six. It was hard to tell in the shifting light. But her eyes gleamed like polished rubies. Her white hair was ragged and short, held away from her angular, hollow-cheeked face by a length of satiny yellow cloth. She wore a black T-shirt and a pair of red, high-cut shorts that showed off her pale, gamin-slim legs.
Kane had seen albino women before in the Terra Infernus, but never one so young and pretty. She looked as if she were crafted from flawless ivory. The treated lenses of his glasses picked out a detail he had missed on first glance. The girl’s headgear wasn’t decorative; it was functional. Blood seeped slowly from the bottom edge of the bandage wrapped around her head.
Injured people were part and parcel of life in the Tartarus Pits. Some days it seemed as if every street were clogged with the walking wounded. But this girl didn’t seem in pain. She seemed terrified. Her eyes darted back and forth like a panicked animal’s. Her delicate pale lips parted, and though he was too far away to hear what she said, Kane was able to read the words formed by them.
She said, “Please. Danger.”
Boon didn’t hear her. At the precise moment she spoke, he whooped in triumph, his hand tightening around her wrist. Grinning, he turned to Kane and Grant and shouted, “I got me a bogie! I got one!”
Grant took the cigar out of his mouth and spit. “Ah, shit. I was afraid of this. Now we’ve got to handle an ejection. Or if Boon has his way, probably an on-the-spot termination.”
He and Kane strode across the lane. The girl shot them a look of crimson terror, then her left leg arced up, the foot landing solidly between Boon’s legs. He choked out a curse and jack-knifed at the waist, dropping the scanner. The girl wrested away from his grasp, spun and loped down the street, running in a graceful, ground-eating stride.
Boon struggled to straighten up, leaning against the wall of a building, clutching at his crotch. His “That bitch!” came out as a strangulated gasp.
Kane found himself angrier with Boon than with the girl. Instead of going off shift, they now had to engage in a probably pointless pursuit through a maze of back alleys and dead-ends. As he ran past Boon, he said tersely, “Catch up when you’re able, dumbass.”
Tails of their coats flying behind them, Grant and Kane sprinted after the white, flitting shape of the girl. She had a head start, was much younger and could run unencumbered by Kevlar coats or handguns.
Grant spit the cigar from his mouth. Kane kept his clenched tightly between his teeth. It was his last one, and he didn’t want to throw it away until it was a smoked-out stub. Legs pumping, boots squashing mud, the two men dashed down the lane. Smoke kept curling into Kane’s nostrils, and he constantly fought the urge to sneeze.
Since it was close to dinnertime, the crowds were thinning out and many of the street vendors closed up their stalls. They didn’t have to dodge many obstacles or push more than three people out of their path. The two men turned a corner and sprinted between the shells of old duraplast buildings that had formerly housed laborers but now served as squats. This part of the Pits wasn’t wired for electricity, and only the most hopeless and helpless lived here. The girl was leading them through the darkest section of the Pits, and Kane remembered that since it wasn’t equipped for electricity, then it wasn’t equipped with spy-eyes, either.
Kane’s thigh muscles felt as if they were seizing and locking up, his chest was caught in an ever-tightening vice and his vision was shot through with grey spots. Because of that, it took him a moment or two to realize their quarry was nowhere in sight.
He stopped running and lurched over to a heap of broken masonry. Grant was a score of yards ahead, still trying to run full out, but his stride was faltering.
Cupping his hands around his mouth, Kane shouted, “Forget it! We’ve lost her!”
His cigar fell to the base of the rock pile, and he stooped over to pick it up. Then he heard the crackle of autofire.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GRANT CONCENTRATED ON running, praying he wouldn’t stumble on the rocky, uneven ground, hoping the nagging pull in his groin wouldn’t get any worse. He didn’t see the girl, only half-tumbled walls overgrown with scraggly vegetation and a pair of dome-roofed duraplast buildings on either side of him.
When he heard Kane shout from behind him, he slowed down in mid-stride, grateful for the chance to stop. His lungs felt as if they were on fire, and he drank in great gasps of air through his open mouth. He cursed the tobacconist, then himself.
As he stopped running, despising the ache in his knees, a cold knot of warning inched up his spine to settle at the nape of his neck. His scalp felt as if it were pulling taut. Something was wrong. He could sense it the way a seasoned wolf senses a trap. He took a few more steps before coming to a complete halt. There was no sign of danger. The sky was a crimson-and-orange wash, the duraplast structures gleamed in the setting sun. Everything seemed in order.
“KEEP coming’ you big black bastich,” Uno crooned quietly. He lay prone beneath a windowsill, the mini-Uzi resting on the decaying wooden sash. He gripped the butt tighter and squinted down its short length. Grant was about five yards below and twenty away. It was fairly long range for such a small gun, but he didn’t have to be precise. The trajectory was just a slight downward angle and there was no wind to worry about.
In the building facing him, he assumed Dos was bringing the big man into his sights, as well.
“Beautiful... keep on comin’, just keep on.”
Kane lagged behind, and that made the order so much easier to complete. Guana Teague had been very clear about keeping Kane alive. There was no sign of the third Mag. It was almost as if some divine providence had arranged the kill to be quick, clean and simple.
If only Dos kept his head and waited until the target was in the exact position for a short, effective cross fire. Then Uno heard the stutter from across the alley and he groaned.
IT took Grant a split second to associate the drumming sound with an autoblaster. As a general rule, gunfire wasn’t a noise common to the Pits. The walls of the buildings amplified the sound and sent it booming back from all points of the compass. Pebbles and stone fragments exploded right in front of him, scouring his face with grit.
He went to one knee, the Sin Eater slapping into his hand, and he automatically braced the pistol with the other. He knew Kane was somewhere behind him, but he didn’t waste any time looking for him. He swung the barrel of his blaster up, toward the secon
d floor of the building on his right. He saw nothing but dark windows.
“Kane,” he shouted. “Spot it!”
“Hit the ground!” Kane’s tense voice floated from behind a pile of rubble.
Grant did as he said, dropping full length and pressing his face into the sharp-edged gravel. Several slugs thumped through the air inches above his head, and then the sounds of the shots followed them. Spouts of dirt sprang up no more than a foot from his right leg.
“Damn it, Kane!” he bellowed. “Spot it!”
CROUCHED down behind the heap of broken brick and masonry, Kane spotted it. Two blasters were speaking from second-floor windows on the facing squats. He gripped the Sin Eater in both hands. He hated many things about his life, but being caught in a cross fire topped the list.
He didn’t expend any mental energy wondering why the girl had led them into the trap or if she had tried to warn Boon about it. This was the second time in twenty-four hours he’d been pinned down by autofire, and that was two times too many.
Keeping his eyes on the window to his right, Kane glimpsed a twinkle of orange flame stab out of the shadows. A divot of dirt flew up between Grant’s splayed legs. One part of his mind identified the reports as belonging to an Uzi.
The other part of his mind locked on to the window. He levelled the Sin Eater and squeezed off three rounds. He saw duraplast dust explode in miniature mushroom clouds all around the window.
“Move!” he roared. “To your left!”
DOS wrenched his body aside as a sleet storm of duraplast chips and powder swept over him. He hefted the mini-Uzi in both hands and fired what was left in the clip toward the black-coated man rolling diagonally over the ground. Eight brass casings rattled down on the wooden floor. The bullets stitched a path across the ground. He hadn’t come close to the target, but he figured Uno could nail him. He watched the man vault to his feet and start running.
Angrily Dos ejected the spent clip and fumbled to insert another one. He’d get the son of a bitch—he’d get the fucking Mag. Or Uno would.