The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  Neither said anything for a few minutes.

  “One more question. How’d I get here? I thought I heard a woman calling my name,” flashed Hoskin.

  “Well now that one is interesting. You did. Sakura, your elusive little friend. She called it in.”

  A Dangerous Body

  2458 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon

  Outside Hoskin’s Apartment Complex, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  Quinlin was hallucinating again. The voices tumbled in, jumbled, clashing.

  “Where is he—”

  “We know—”

  “—have you been?”

  Images poured in with the voices: a man opening a door; someone running; a short woman stabbing someone.

  Surges of emotions tangled with the images. His throat tightened. He felt a boiling rage and then a deep and overwhelming sadness and loneliness.

  He popped another dose of Float and closed his eyes. After a minute, the voices, images and emotions faded and disappeared.

  He took a deep breath, relieved. The voices were a distant carnival now.

  He’d already taken three doses today, more than he was supposed to but it was the only thing that seemed to be working. He couldn’t tell Hoskin that he’d been on a bender because he was seeing things and hearing things and he was trying to drown them out. How do you even start that conversation?

  Listen, I’m going crazy…

  He’d pumped himself with every drug he could. Nothing worked. Then he got lucky. He’d plugged his mind into an anonymous Psychiatrist remote service. The AI at the other end analyzed his mind and flashed him the synth recipe for Float, a powerful anti-psychotic.

  At first he refused to take it. He wasn’t psychotic. He’d spent another two days flooding his system with a dozen other drugs. Then the news came in that Hoskin was in the hospital and it woke him up. He tried the Float. It silenced the voices almost immediately. Mostly. They still came, but not as much.

  He took another deep breath and sat for a minute just to be sure. No voices. He saw a tiny flash of green and then red light. It was a side effect of Float, but one he could live with.

  With Hoskin recovering Quinlin decided to follow the girl, Sakura. He thought about telling Hoskin, but stopped himself. The old man didn’t usually have blind spots, but he had one for that girl. She’d saved his life, apparently, but for Quinlin nothing added up. How did she just happen to be there when he got attacked? Twice. The girl knew something.

  Quinlin stealthed his aircar outside Hoskin’s apartment and waited for her. She’d told Hoskin she couldn’t go home, asked if she could stay at his apartment, just for a while. Quinlin said it wasn’t a good idea. But the way Hoskin saw it, she’d saved his life, period. It meant she wasn’t involved with the killer. Yeah, she had something to hide, but it wasn’t related to the killings. Quinlin didn’t push. As usual, Hoskin made perfect sense, but something told Quinlin to keep looking. He didn’t know what her angle was or why, just—something was not right.

  He’d remoted into Hoskin’s Apartment with root privs. He watched the apartment microcamera feeds. She hadn’t gotten out of bed all day. He zoomed on her face. She looked depressed, worried.

  He realized he was fingering his mother’s amulet again. He pulled it out of his shirt. The day Hoskin found it he’d gone and put it on and kept it on ever since. Swore he wouldn’t lose it again. Looking at it, he tried to remember his mother’s face, but it was just a blank spot in his mind. And he didn’t want to pull her up from his backbrain. That wasn’t the same. He wanted to remember it. Shouldn’t a guy be able to picture his mother? But he couldn’t. He figured if he just kept staring at it her face would come back to him. For days he’d stared at the amulet, sober, drunk, high, and still nothing. He put it away with a sigh.

  The girl got up suddenly. It looked like she was heading for the shower.

  Better get moving.

  He hated to rush. Sometimes it took him thirty minutes to roll a single joint. But it was time to get moving so he finished rolling the last one quickly, jabbed it in his mouth and lit it. He took a good drag of Baby Blue. In seconds it started to juice his nervous system and give him an intense focus. It didn’t seem to interfere with the Float, other than making him a little more jittery.

  Quinlin thought about Hoskin’s attitude towards drugs. Only use them when you absolutely have to. He’d always thought the old man was crazy, a dinosaur.

  “You crazy old monk,” Quinlin would say.

  “Whatever I’m feelin’ right now is good enough for me,” Hoskin would say. “Mood’ll change on its own just fine.”

  “Not me. Precision mood alteration. Know exactly how I’m gonna feel from one second to the next. Way of the modern man, my friend.”

  Except now he was wondering if all those drugs had finally caught up to him and fucked up his mind. What else could it be? He’d never seen shit before, except when he was supposed to, like on psychedelics. Ever since the murders started he’d been seeing things on and off, just a little at first, late at night as he was going to bed, drifting. It was easy to pass off as he was half asleep. He didn’t worry about it. Right before the bender he’d really unraveled, the hallucinations coming on with a new intensity. He’d seen terrible things: stabbings; dismemberments. He’d lost it.

  The girl jumped in the shower. In the low-lit bathroom her body showed brilliantly as she soaped herself down. Blue light flickered and Quinlin rubbed his eyes to make it go away. He remembered Hoskin telling him she’d taken pills to heal up her fetish mods. He was happy to see she didn’t have any extra tits or something like that, whatever she’d had before. He didn’t go in for anything crazy. Women looked good enough as they were.

  He stopped packing up for a minute and watched, the Baby already hitting his blood stream. She moved hypnotically, lathering her body in long slow circles. Quinlin didn’t have a water shower, but watching her, he thought about getting one.

  What you hiding with that dangerous body, girl?

  All he knew was that he’d drenched her with a cloud of mites big enough to track a parking lot full of trucks and the nano burned up before she got five steps from the front door of Hoskin’s building. Twice. Once was a fluke. Twice meant countermeasures.

  “Somethin’ not right with you, sister. What whore got herself some countermeasures?”

  She did look good. Quinlin knew women. He’d had a lot of them, but this girl was designed to trigger a man’s lust, built to perfection for expensive clientele. He knew how it worked. He’d been with enough whores himself. After they’d got a girl on ship, they sent her to the gene surgeons and rebuilt her. They blew her tits up big, tightened her waist, widened her hips, gave her a flat stomach and delicately muscled legs, then built her an ass as bitable as an apple. They teased out and elongated all of her lines like they were designing a race car. She sweated perfume and moved like a gazelle. Even in an age of cheap beauty a man reacted to her at a primordial level. Couldn’t help it.

  Quinlin had been with housewives and whores, executives and exotic dancers, but he rarely saw a woman as stunning as Sakura. She was a work of art, designed to hypnotize. Someone had crafted her, spent time on her, loved his work. She wasn’t no cheap Willows hooker. High end design all the way. She seemed to be putting on a show, as if she knew someone was watching.

  Maybe she does?

  He heard the alien voices as he watched her, but tiny, far away, like white noise barely there.

  She shut off the water and stepped out, the steam clinging to her. He packed up his drug-laced cigarettes one by one and slotted them into a finely-chiseled gold case with a holographic phoenix on its side, the bird burning to dust and reforming on an endless loop. He started the car, ready to move. He took a last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out.

  She got dressed quickly, something Quinlin thought strange. Just a
bout every woman he knew, young or old, pretty or ugly, took a long time getting herself together. But Sakura simply toweled off her hair and pulled on a light, yellow summer dress and low heels and was headed for the door a minute later.

  Outside the house she stopped and looked around slowly. When she came to where Quinlin’s car hung hidden in the air, she stopped. Her eyes narrowed.

  Looking right at me. She knows.

  A flash of red light blurred his vision for a moment, but faded. The voices picked up, louder, breaking through the Float. He’d have to pull out, but then she just turned quickly and started walking at a normal pace, not hurrying.

  Fuck it, follow her anyway.

  She couldn’t have seen the car. He’d added some of his own mods to the stealth system and it was perfect when the car wasn’t in motion. You absolutely could not see or hear it. He’d surrounded it with a firewall that would trick any mites that hit the car into thinking they’d just passed through empty space. Still, he couldn’t be sure.

  You got counter measures, girl. What else you got?

  If she knew he was following her, she wasn’t showing it, because she turned and strolled in no hurry down Hoskin’s street swinging her arms, her shoulders thrown back, even as people scrambled past her. Quinlin saw the time in the corner of his eye. It was 18:50, close to curfew. She turned left at the end of the street and headed south.

  Quinlin pulled up a map in his mind and ran a quick smart search. Shit. The search said she was most likely heading for a public Tangle station. Quinlin would have to abandon the car.

  Thinking fast, he decided to airpark the car around the corner from the station. He’d have to unstealth and he didn’t want her seeing a cop car hovering right by the entrance or she might get nervous.

  He slid the door open and jumped down, landing on his feet with a loud slap as his leather loafers hit the street.

  Fuck. You just had to wear these shoes, didn’t you, motherfucker?

  He blinked on holostealth and started running so he could be there when she reached the entrance. He moved as fast as he could through the crowds. It was getting late.

  People were rushing, pushing.

  “All citizens outside their homes after 20:00 are subject to arrest,” boomed a beautifully synthesized woman’s voice from the city wide public speaker system.

  A dark, wasp-like riot drone streaked by overhead. People looked up at it nervously.

  “Be advised: Curfew rules are in effect. Police authorized to use deadly force. Violate curfew at your own risk.”

  The messages repeated endlessly.

  Quinlin was invisible, so when he bumped people they turned and saw no one. He reached the station and flattened himself against the wall so people wouldn’t run into him. He looked around. Couldn’t see her.

  He tossed a cloud of mites into the air. They streamed back a 360-degree view of the area. His backbrain went to work, looking at each face and body fast.

  There.

  She was already going down the stairs into the station.

  The station was packed. He’d have to unstealth. He blinked the holocamo off and plunged into the crowd, trying to keep his eye on Sakura but keeping his distance. He followed her yellow dress as he pushed and weaved his way down the stairs.

  She reached the first platform and it branched off in three directions. She took the stairs to the left and that’s when her dress changed color. Black now.

  Countermeasures.

  She disappeared through the huge archway etched with carvings in old Dutch, bound for the northern part of the city. He picked up the pace so he wouldn’t lose her. He shoved some people.

  “Hey motherfucker, you’re gonna make me miss curfew,” said a guy, loudly.

  Quinlin kept moving, ignoring him. He scanned the crowd going down the stairs through the second door. She was at the bottom of the second set of stairs now, merging into the crowd. He pushed ahead against the anxious sea of people, but wasn’t getting anywhere. She walked straight onto the second level platform and disappeared.

  “—curfew rules are in effect. Police authorized—”

  It took Quinlin a minute to get down the stairs and he didn’t see her anywhere. Flashes of color sprayed across his vision. He ignored them. He surreptitiously released a cloud of mites, keeping his hand low. Nothing. They didn’t see her either. There were only two doors on this platform. 50/50. He picked one, taking the steps in big strides.

  The yellow emergency system lights along the wall turned red as the clock ticked to 19:00. The scrolling message underneath it read “one hour until mandatory curfew. Please return to your homes quickly.”

  He got to the third-level platform and looked around. The platform stretched out before him with huge doors on both sides, lines of people waiting to walk through them and blip out to different parts of the city. The tanned walls looked freshly rejuved, their skin healthy. Holographic destination signs hung in the air. The giant ads that blazed on the walls were silent, muted by the emergency broadcast system.

  Finally he saw her. He’d picked right. Her dress had shifted colors again. Blue now.

  She was going into a Tangle door that would drop her instantly at the northern part of the city. He hustled down the platform. There was a line for the door. He held up his hand. On his palm his badge flared for a moment and disappeared, just long enough for the path-tracking smartware to scan him and order him through the “personnel only” door just next to it.

  He went through the door and into the Tangle. He stepped out onto the main platform of Sundevil station, the walls bright yellow and red and orange, the ceiling soaring and painted with an elaborate mural of a mountain range set against a blood-orange sunscape. Forty automat vendors stood eerily quiet and odor free. Usually the smell of grease blanketed the air around them. A lone Sentinel scanned the crowd, people leaving a wide space around it.

  A blinding flash of Float colors hit him and he had to stop for a second, get a hold of himself, wait for his vision to clear up. It was like getting blinded by the sun.

  Come on. Come on. Gonna lose her. Slowly, too slowly his vision cleared up.

  He spotted her again, just as she disappeared through another door that led to the city’s edge. He followed her into the Brotherhood and Freedom station, the organic walls ripping and flaking. It was one of the oldest stations on the ship. Worker crabs tried to repair the damage, moving in long lines. She took the wide central stairs. Quinlin got to the stairs just as she disappeared over the top.

  “Return to your homes. Return to your homes. Mandatory curfew in effect.”

  He pushed through the anxious crowd and hustled up the stairs. He got to the top just as she was getting into an onyx black aircar with mirrored windows. He flashed a request to the CityGrid to track the car. It took three minutes to authorize and then came back with nothing. The car was a ghost. The city was blind. The whore had slipped him.

  Slick, woman. Real slick.

  ***

  Quinlin made sure she wouldn’t slip him again.

  He dove the city darknets and with a flurry of commands took over the Feuersturm swarmnet, a cloud of root-kitted mircocameras that blanketed the city like an early morning fog. It was one of thousands of long-abandoned viruses that had attacked the city’s infrastructure over the course of its history, and still went on morphing and attacking vulnerable systems like soldiers who didn’t know the war was over.

  Just to see if he could, Quinlin had spent months trying to trick the swarm’s decentralized intelligence into letting him issue it commands and it had paid off. As far as he knew, he was the only hacker who’d broken into it. Even security researchers and the city’s AIs had failed to get inside it and exterminate it.

  The swarm didn’t have the sweep and scope of the CityGrid, but it had enough trojaned cameras to watch more than half the city, and it could watch a lot of places the city couldn’t, like private residences it had infected.
He told it to scan every face it saw for the girl and alert him.

  Quinlin sat inside the swarm’s center and watched the city with its hundreds of thousands of eyes. He split his backbrain into about ninety slices, watching as many streams as he could at the same time with his vSelves. Hacking calmed his mind and he hadn’t needed any Float today.

  Everywhere it looked like the city was going to pop. He saw riot drones firing rubber bullets at a crowd of rock-throwing kids. People were out everywhere defying curfew, packing the late night clubs. As soon as the overworked cops shut one down, another opened up or people spilled into the streets and clashed with other groups and the military. They could only arrest so many people. The cops filled up their mobile jails only to release everyone a few hours later, because they had nowhere to put anyone. The city jails were stuffed to as much as three times capacity. Fights had broken out in the tight quarters. Dozens of prisoners had ended up in the hospital. At least one died.

  Several gunfights had erupted at different spots in the city, the military killing at least three people, wounding fifteen others. At least they hadn’t fired into an unarmed crowd yet. That’s all it would take for the city to explode.

  The imagery poured into his fractured mind. It took everything he had to hold his concentration on the barrage of voices and images and smells. At four in the morning he found her, in a strip club called Ragazze Di Fantasia in the Southern Lights. He jacked up his nervous system and popped a few metaboosters. Just lightweight stuff, he didn’t want to tip the delicate equilibrium his mind had right now. He’d slept in a black running suit and gel sneakers so he was ready to go if he needed to chase her on foot.

  This time you ain’t gettin’ away, girlie.

  He was down by the club in about fifteen minutes and landed on the roof. He parked towards the back. Holostealth didn’t work as well in the rain and he didn’t want anyone looking up and seeing ghostly outlines of a cop car before the software corrected for it, even if it was only for a microsecond.