The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  Hoskin broke into a run to catch up. His mouth felt dry. He’d flipped his body to lipolysis so he didn’t have to eat, but it was making his extreme exhaustion symptoms worse. Nobody was on the streets, not even street gangs. Everyone was afraid now.

  Hoskin caught up to Daniels and saw him going into an apartment building. The building looked abused, with sores spiraling across it. He sighted the car and tagged it with new mites. It seemed like Daniels’ car was getting more aggressive, rapidly killing whatever he hit it with.

  He approached the building fast and went inside, quietly closing the door behind him.

  A shot rang out.

  He dropped to one knee and his gun hand flared purple.

  Another shot.

  His ears pinpointed the sound. It came from outside. More shots. It was a firefight somewhere nearby, not coming from inside the building. Hoskin got low and looked out the window.

  He couldn’t see anything at first, and then he saw a pair of Sentinels firing, their tracers lighting up the night. Someone was shooting at them, but he couldn’t see who. He stayed low. The Sentinels charged down the street and disappeared into the smoke and fog. He listened for a few minutes and the shooting died off.

  He stood up slowly, cautiously. He flipped his ears to high precision and thought he heard Daniels a few floors up.

  He climbed the eroded stairs. The white guts of the building showed through big rips in the wall tissue.

  Something jumped at him from around the corner and he brought his gun hand up fast. He looked again.

  Nothing there.

  It was the just the dark. His eyes were playing tricks. Not good. He took a deep breath, but let it out slow, staying quiet.

  He didn’t know if Daniels knew he was being followed, but he’d gotten more and more evasive over the last few hours. Maybe his car had already tipped him off that it was battling more nano then usual? Hoskin thought he heard breathing around the corner. He fired off some mites and they shot back video. Daniels was there. He looked around carefully and then used a sneak and peek stick to break open the biometric lock on an apartment door. Hoskin went up another flight and crouched down.

  He pulled up records on the building. It was half empty. This floor only had two residents. The apartment Daniels had broken into was unoccupied. He waited. The seconds crawled by. As the lipolysis kicked in harder, he swore he could feel his body eating itself and knew he’d pay for all this later. The lights in the stairwell were flickering.

  A half hour later, Daniels was on the move again. He left the apartment. Hoskin crept down the stairs. He approached the door. It was partially ajar. It looked familiar for some reason. He opened it cautiously and went in.

  “Police, anybody in here?”

  No answer. He moved into the apartment, gun hand raised. He went room to room slowly, clearing them all. Nobody. No squatters. The air in the apartment was heavy and dank. The windows were crusted with dust and none of them were open. Squirrelrats skittered away in several of the rooms. There was no furniture in the place. Nothing was left behind.

  Maybe something had happened here? He pulled up historical crime data on the place. It had been the site of two murders, one six years ago and another fifty years before that. The names and faces of the victims and the killers didn’t mean anything to him. He pulled up a list of tenants, but the data was spotty. He scanned the names, looking for anyone familiar and he found one. Venadrik. One of the three hookers lived here. It was Rukhsana Venadrik, the one with the system tech son who’d died.

  It didn’t make any sense. Why the fuck was Daniels looking into a death that happened years ago? Was there someone else in the family he’d missed? He pulled up her family tree again. A constellation of images surrounded the woman’s face. He stared into her eyes. The picture moved on a loop. She laughed and brushed back her hair then looked right at the camera. She had thick lips and dark skin.

  “What the fuck do you know Daniels? What am I missing?”

  In the corner of the room he noticed something. It was small and low to the ground. He bent down and looked at it. A skillful picture of a small child holding a doll was etched into the peeling biowall, the carving now covered over with scar tissue.

  He examined the rest of the house more closely but found nothing else. Finally, he left the building, looking around cautiously. Nobody was on the street. He hustled back to his car. He waved his hand to open it when he heard two loud cracks and something hit him hard. Whatever hit him knocked him off his feet and he crashed against the car door. Hoskin realized the gelskin had absorbed the blasts and most of the shock. He should be dead.

  Feet pounding. Coming hard. Multiple directions.

  Hoskin’s backbrain flooded his body with adrenaline. He tried to stand up but someone was on him. He whipped around, lashing out with elbows. Sharp pain in his side. Burning. Hoskin managed to flip over and a body barreled into him and knocked him back again. Someone over him, moving fast, too fast. Stabbing. Slashing. A sizzling flame. Something caught Hoskin twice, once in the chest, once in the stomach.

  Hoskin’s gun hand broke open and blasted the attacker in the stomach. The guy’s stomach exploded and he crumpled like a broken doll.

  Footsteps. A blur to his left. Someone rushing him. All his amplified senses came online now. Someone off to his right too. He raised his gun arm. It felt heavy, like granite. The burning spread inside him. Hot. The guy on the left, coming fast.

  That’s when Hoskin saw his own face on the man.

  Shocked, he dropped his hand for a split second, enough for the attacker to raise his arm and fire six quick shots point blank from a hand cannon. The shots hit him in the face, neck and chest. The blasts hit like bricks, but the gelskin held up.

  Now it was the second attacker who looked shocked.

  Those shots would have taken out anybody. Hoskin got his arm up and fired. The man’s torso flew apart like leaves, the blast nearly cutting him in half.

  Hoskin struggled up. Bright red warnings filled his innervision. Alarms screamed in his mind. He was hurt bad. The damage was spreading from the stab wounds and the concussive effects of the blasts. A third attacker, not far off, sighted him with an assault rifle. Three short bursts exploded next to him.

  Hoskin felt dizzy, but he got to his feet and ran for cover. Out of the corner of his eye, Hoskin saw the first attacker’s face. His face too. Hoskin slipped behind some docked aircars. More shots. Running.

  He got up and ran all out around the side of the building, weaving wildly. His arm broke open and he sighted glowglobes overhead and took them out in a burst of amber light with heat seeking ammo. He couldn’t aim, but the ammo could. He ran on pure instinct now, a feral animal, everything blurry and going black.

  His eyes adjusted to the sudden dark instantly. He spied a spot between a few tightly parked cars and dashed between them and waited, trying to control his breath and keep from blacking out, hoping his attacker didn’t have night vision. Like a wounded lion, lying in the long grass, hoping for one more chance to get at the thing that hurt him, he hunkered down and waited.

  His ears rezzed up and he could hear soft footsteps amplified loudly. Boom. Boom. Right by him. Getting closer. There. He lunged out and tackled his last assailant, surprising him. The guy’s gun skittered away and Hoskin scrambled on top of him. Once again he saw his own face again looking up at him. He hit that face again and again, his gun arm still open, something cracking. His attacker tried to defend, his hands held up, but Hoskin moved fast now, in an animal’s frenzy. Pieces of the face beneath him ripped.

  Sirens in the distance now. He couldn’t stay awake much longer. Red warnings scarred his vision and he slipped. The attacker bucked and Hoskin lost control and the guy was over him now, on top. A sizzle, as a fission knife slid out of the guy’s wrist. He thought he heard a woman’s voice calling his name and then he put his gun hand to the side of the guy’s head and the last thing he remembe
red was blowing his own face apart.

  An Unexpected Savior

  Hoskin woke up in water.

  Gasping, he thrashed wildly, instinctively trying to push to the surface for air.

  “Whoa, whoa, easy there, champ,” flashed a familiar voice.

  Quinlin.

  “Breathe, brother, breathe. You’re in a recovery tank.”

  Fighting basic instinct, Hoskin forced himself to breathe normally. No water flooded his mouth, and he closed his eyes, breathing deep and letting himself float. He opened his eyes again and reached up to touch his face. He wore a gillymask, a soft, lichen-like biomaterial that sucked oxygen directly out of medwater. Nervewires snaked from his arm and he looked at them in wonder. He didn’t see a clock in the corner of his eye, so his backbrain was switched off.

  “What happened?” flashed Hoskin.

  “You got hit on the street. Three attackers—”

  “—they had my face.”

  “Yeah. You got ‘em, but—”

  “—they got me too.”

  “Right.”

  Hoskin’s memory flooded back to him, and he remembered Quinlin had been AWOL for almost a week. “Where the fuck have you been?”

  Quinlin let out a long sigh. “Don’t worry about me right now—”

  “Fuck that. Where have you been, goddammit? You got me checking the morgues? You disappear? I want to know what the fuck?”

  “Been on a bad bender, but when I heard what happened to you on the department alert system—”

  “Are you kidding me? A bender? What the fuck is going on? You ain’t telling me everything.”

  “Look I will. I promise. I fucked up. That’s all. It’s no more complicated than that.”

  “I expect answers. If anybody deserves ‘em, I do. You fuckin’ kidding me? You tell me the goddamn truth and I mean it. Are you in trouble?”

  “Other than a reprimand from the department and some mandatory counseling, no. Cap went easy on me. I’m all right, I think. I’m sorry. No other way to say it. I just screwed up. I’ve got it under control now. I’m not going anywhere. But this has got to wait. You got to get better.”

  “This is not over. I expect answers and I will get them. If I have to personally lock you in rehab I will. You understand me?”

  “Yeah. I won’t lie about nothing. And I understand.”

  “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again.”

  “Yeah.”

  Hoskin thought back to the attack. His mind was hazy. Out of habit he tried to pull up the images, but nothing came to his innervision.

  “Backbrain’s shut off,” flashed Hoskin.

  “Yeah, they didn’t want you to wake up overloaded,” flashed Quinlin.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Bad. But you woulda been dead if not for that gelskin DS fixed you up with.”

  “So you know—”

  “Some of it. They showed up not long after you got here. Those fuckers didn’t want to say anything at first, but the docs didn’t know what they were looking at, how you’d survived so many shots up close. Whatever it was, they thought it might wreck their tools in surgery, so the chief surgeon got in their face and I did too. They were right. Lasers can’t get through it. They coulda used a fission knife, but not accurate enough. I had to get in your backbrain, issue a de-bond command to the stuff. Crazy shit man. It took like twenty minutes for it to melt off and they had to keep you alive with mites they shoved down your throat and remoted.”

  “I knew there was a reason I let you have root privs,” flashed Hoskin.

  “Shiiiit. I woulda got it anyway, old man.”

  Hoskin felt himself smile beneath the mask.

  “I got stabbed, right?” flashed Hoskin.

  “Yeah, seven times. Heart, lung, neck. They were not fuckin’ around. DS hadn’t given you redundant heart—”

  “Wait, what?”

  “They fixed you up with some redundancy. Gave you a backup heart. Tiny little thing. Amazing. Distributed. Attached to the main—”

  “I didn’t ask them to put that in.”

  “Well they did anyway. And you’re lucky they did, else we’d be growing you a new body right now and restoring you from backup.”

  “Right.”

  A tall, thin man came into the room. He wore a doctor’s traditional green robe and a caduceus holo blazed on his chest. A bulky green docball trailed after him, surrounded by a soft purple aura. The man had an all-plastic body with two of his four hands folded behind his back and two folded in front.

  “Well, Detective Hoskin, the scanners said you’d come around. I’m chief surgeon Moldavi. How are you feeling? Just touch the disc on your neck there so I can hear you.”

  The doctor held up his hand and the palm glowed bright yellow. He moved the hand with precision, left to right, scanning down Hoskin’s body.

  Hoskin reached up and touched the vibradisc on his throat. His voice came out through speakers outside the tank. It sounded like somebody else’s voice when he heard it filtered through the medwater.

  “Like I just got run over by a truck,” said Hoskin.

  “You’re lucky to be alive—“

  “So I hear. How long I gotta be here, doc?”

  “Hard to say. I’ll have a better idea by tomorrow, after all my scans finish. I trust Detective Quinlin isn’t bothering you?” said the doctor, smiling.

  The smile looked strange on his plastic face.

  “If you could send in some guards to wrestle him outta here in a few that would be great, but I think he likes lookin’ at me naked.”

  “Yeah, love it,” said Quinlin.

  The doctor chuckled, all part of his routine.

  “Excellent, excellent. I’ll check in on you in a bit,” said the surgeon. He pivoted like a ballerina and walked out.

  “Look I’m going to need you to get after Daniels. He knows something. And we’re running out of time,” flashed Hoskin.

  “That’s gonna be hard,” flashed Quinlin.

  “Why? I’ve been following the guy for two days—”

  “He’s dead.”

  Hoskin couldn’t believe it. “That can’t be.”

  “It is. He got hit a little after you did, in an abandoned factory complex just outside the city.”

  Hoskin thought for a minute. It could only mean one thing.

  “We gotta get access to his backbrain. He figured it out,” flashed Hoskin.

  “Getting access is gonna be real, real hard. This is CII. His whole body is classified. All his memories. And he figured out what?”

  “We got to find a way to get access. He figured out who Multiface is. I tracked him non-stop for days. He was on to something. I figured either he was the killer or he knew who the killer was. Guess this kinda narrows it down. I need you to pull up every single record you can find on the Venadrik family and anyone related to them. Alive or dead, I need to know everything about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Daniels was trailing them. He talked to a hooker in the Southern Lights who knew Rukhsana Venadrik. And then he went to Rukhsana’s apartment, where she died.”

  “Wait. Did you say a hooker in the Southern Lights? What was her name?”

  “Yeah. Kagney Lynn—”

  “—Cartesian or Cartesia or something?”

  Quinlin’s eyes darted around and Hoskin knew he was looking at something on his innervision. “Yeah, Cartesia. Girl’s dead too. Poisoned.”

  “Then our guy is cleaning up anything and everything. He’s closing any loops. I talked to her a few days ago. When did she die?”

  “Couple days ago. Probably just after you talked to her. A John with an appointment found her. Came in with a one-time client door code, expecting her in bed, waiting, and found her in bed, drooling, eyes rolled back. Called it in. Who was the hooker Daniels was looking at?”

  “Rukhsana Venadrik.”

  Quinlin’s eyes
bounced around.

  “Um, the woman died like almost 50 years ago,” flashed Quinlin.

  “I know. But she’s the key. I don’t know why. Get me everything you can find. I don’t care how irrelevant. Everything.”

  “All right. You got it. But you got to rest, man. I’ll get it to you in a day or so.”

  “You know better than that. You don’t get it for me, I’ll just get what I can myself. I got to stay on this. And I am not waiting. You know me. I’ll get my brain switched back on and go after it.”

  “All right.”

  “Whadda we know about the attackers?” flashed Hoskin.

  “Other than they had your face? Nothing. Why the fuck did they have your face, man? Never seen anything like it. We weren’t sure if you were dead for a few seconds, and then I linked your backbrain and saw your ghost signature. The others had different ghosts that matched stolen identities. What the fuck’s going on here?”

  “I’m getting close is the only explanation. The killer wants me dead and he’s already got to that hooker I talked to and Daniels. I just got lucky. That’s clear. And you better watch yourself. You got to be on that list too.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “You better be. I don’t want to go looking for you again. All right? Now get me that dump of everything about the Venadrik woman and everyone she’s connected to.”

  “All right but you take it easy though. A least for a day. I know you, you’ll be up as soon as you can be, but doc says I shouldn’t even be talking with you about this shit yet. Get you all stirred up, pop a blood vessel or something. I mean they didn’t even let the Cap in to see you or anyone from DS. Only let me in ‘cause I swore I’d keep my mouth shut, and I told them I was the only family you got.”

  Hoskin took a deep breath, closed his eyes and let himself drift.

  “I’ll take it easy when I’m dead,” flashed Hoskin. “We get the bodies of the guys who attacked me?”

  “Yeah, Cap made sure of it. CII tried to get ‘em, but Cap wouldn’t budge. Never seen her so fired up. Azusa’s goin’ over ‘em now.”