The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  He’d monitored the girl the whole time. The swarm had control of every camera in the club and outside it. Maybe not so much of a surprise since the virus had better luck cracking the poor areas. They got upgraded or patched at lot less.

  His police scanner pulsed relentlessly:

  “All units in the Northern quad respond. CityGrid reports looting—”

  “Shots fired—”

  “Need emergency vehicle on—”

  The filthy rain hammered his car. It had rained in the Southern Lights for fifty years. Huge patches of skin had rotted off the buildings. Nothing grew there. No plants or trees could survive. It reminded him of when he was a kid, just enlisted in the Jovian army, when he’d looked out at a killing field days after a massive battle, the bodies putrefying into the dirt. What organic matter hadn’t died under the rain’s incessant barrage had turned hard as stone. This was not for high class hookers. This was for the used up, the fetish whores, the burnouts, the sick. This was where whores came to die.

  She came out of the club. A massive man came out with her, holding her bag and an ultrasonic umbrella. As soon as Quinlin saw her, a wave of strange, jumbled, alien emotions hit him, along with images of flowers in the rain and sounds like trumpets and voices.

  “—get back—”

  “—need—”

  “—on fire—”

  Fuck. He slammed his fist on the dash. Knew it was too good to be true. He popped some Float as fast as he could. It started to kick in, the images getting dimmer, and he tried to concentrate on the girl.

  The guy with her was big as an ox and wore some kind of cling-skin body armor. It made it look like his skin was made of stone.

  Quinlin did a silent start on his car and got ready. He heard a foghorn in the distance and voices hard to understand, tripping over each other, clashing, but they were already dying down as the Float went to work.

  The mirror windowed car was waiting for her. The ox helped her in and then went around the other side. Some kids charged at him, but he threw them aside and drew a fission blade on them. They took off running.

  Quinlin ran a scan on the guy’s face to check for a record and vitals. It came back with a profile, Jagan Kilgore, a nobody, a life-long bouncer and low-level enforcer with the Mountain Snakes.

  There wasn’t a lot of traffic, so he hung back so they wouldn’t spot the car in the rain. He stayed up high, figuring that gave him a better chance. They probably wouldn’t look above them. The black car moved swiftly, knifing through the side streets of the Southern Lights.

  The voices died down to white noise as the Float did its magic. Thank God. Maybe Hoskin can help? He knows something about everything. No time to worry about that now. Focus on the girl.

  When they got out past the edge of the district’s busted microclimes, he felt relieved. The rain ended abruptly and he was free to tail the car closer. The Tangles were shut down past curfew, so she couldn’t use those again.

  Just outside the district, the car stopped and Sakura and the ox got out and plunged down an alley. Quinlin soared over the building and spotted them getting into a different mirror windowed car.

  They took off at furious pace. Quinlin had a map of police and military checkpoints scrolling across his dash. Her car seemed to know where they were too, turning abruptly several times to avoid them. Eventually he saw she was heading for The Rainbow, a four-mile bridge that connected the city to the surrounding countryside. During the day the white bridge absorbed the artificial rays of the sun and at night the pillars became saturated with shifting colors using the absorbed energy. It curved like a giant mythological snake over the dark churning waters surrounding the city.

  Where the hell you going, girl?

  Not far ahead Quinlin could see the car, its mirror windows reflecting the brilliant colors. That’s when Sakura’s abruptly U-turned and headed back towards the city.

  Not gonna lose you this time.

  She was hiding something and he would get her for it. After a few minutes, he could tell her car was headed for northern part of the city, the richest part outside of the cloud mansions. She was still avoiding checkpoints with ease. As they got closer to the north, the thick, massive starscrapers seemed to get bigger and bigger, dwarfing the rest of the city.

  Her car passed through a checkpoint, a portal of soft energy that scanned them. It didn’t matter that his car was stealthed, it knew he was there too and queried his car for ID. Nobody got into this area without a reason to be there. Lucky he was a cop.

  Beyond the gate there was no traffic and no police or military checkpoints. This was a citadel, a compound for the wealthy and so far safe from unrest.

  Her car slowed down now. It moved with ease, turning left, then right, the buildings stretching up around them like towers made of light. They passed through a second portal, the energy strange and exotic. Spears of dark purple and green energy stabbed the car, clamping down on it like a giant mouth. He knew the gate could turn him to ash in seconds but his ID cleared and the energy peeled back.

  There were gardens surrounding many of the buildings, all of them filled with iridescent flowers and stretching for blocks, some for a half kilometer or more. Tiny rivers and lakes threaded the gardens. The buildings here had room to breathe, each on its own plot of land. The powerful and imposing buildings made Quinlin feel like an insect staring up at a mountain. Unlike the lower part of the city, which was built on the grid, the roads here wound and twisted.

  Her car kept heading north but it was descending. Quinlin noticed dark trees below, sparse at first and then quickly growing thick and tangled, sweeping forward towards a dimly lit starscraper that looked like it was made from the tangled black wood. Its gnarled form twisted into the clouds.

  She landed and drove on wheels now, taking the only road through the trees. The car turned off the road and passed right through some false trees, a holollusion. Quinlin hovered in front of it and stopped. Anything that had holostealth had alarms. He decided to go over instead. He zoomed up above the heavy tree layer and caught sight of the car below him, moving quickly down a path.

  He didn’t need to go far. The road dead-ended at an energy shield. The car passed through and pulled up a snaking driveway to stop at the front door of the dark tower, set in a clearing. It looked like a massive thorn, piercing the sky.

  He considered landing behind the building, but thought better of it. The tower would have passive defenses, and probably active ones. He circled back towards the forest’s edge and parked about half a kilometer down the road. He got out and headed into the woods, turning up his night vision and pulling his holocloak tight.

  The forest was absurdly dense and it was slow going. Quinlin was in near-perfect shape, but the erratic pace the forest dictated tired him. He could run for twenty miles easily with his enhanced physique, but crawling over giant roots and sliding between tree trunks set too tightly together was a different kind of workout, using muscles that he didn’t usually work.

  As he got closer, it sounded like the forest was whispering to him. He popped another half-dose of Float, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The voices were still there, talking low, and he couldn’t understand them. He thought about turning back for a minute. If he was hallucinating, how would he know what was real and what wasn’t? No, he was not going to stop. He ignored the sounds and wove his way through the dense woods.

  Minutes later, he found a small opening in the microforest near the left wing of the tower. The voices were louder now, incessant, but he still couldn’t understand them. There was no energy gate there and no fence. He let loose a storm of military nano that he’d scavenged, cloned and modded back when he’d served in the army. The mites took different paths, some diving from the sky, some going straight in, others circling around. He was sure the tower had some kind of anti-nano defense, but if anything could bust through it would be the military nano. Except for the orbital mansions, no civilia
n defense system was rated to protect against military grade attacks.

  The mites stormed the tower from all directions, sliding in through invisible holes and blasting inside.

  All of it died instantly. For the first time Quinlin was afraid.

  Nothing should take out that much mil-nano that fast. Quinlin was sure he’d made a mistake now. To make one this late in the run was unnerving, like walking a tightrope and losing your balance just as you step off.

  Turn around. Forget this. No. No way. I finish this.

  A flash of images swept him: people in a room, yelling at each other, a door. He saw someone looking at him and for a second it was like he could see through the other person’s eyes. The Float was failing.

  He pulled his holocloak tight. He would break in and deal with the consequences later. He had to see what was inside. This was it. He’d never been more sure of anything in his life. And he’d never seen a lock he couldn’t get through.

  He crept out of the trees and went down to one knee, breathing hard, the voices a chorus through static. He waited for a few minutes. When nothing attacked him and no alarms sounded, he headed for the back of the tower, moving slowly, carefully, getting his breath under control. A two-story energy gate was embedded in the dark wall of the building. He looked at its scan panel. He recognized the model, a Weaver XD-2207. He’d studied door defense for almost a hundred years. The army taught him first, where he’d specialized in breaching, and he’d stuck with it over the years. Very few people could break through modern door defenses without explosives, including the military. This one, the Weaver, used a full body snap scan that recorded state vector, and fell back to a DNA probe with gas.

  The voices got louder in his mind and he wanted to tear at his temples and rip them out. He would have to back out. There was no way he could go in like this. No. No. He forced himself to stare at the Weaver. There was a way around it. He started searching for exploits with passive scans at first, so as not to trip any sensors. His head hurt badly.

  Then a crazy idea hit him. Let it scan him. Don’t be a stupid. Now he knew he was really losing it. He fought off the thought and concentrated. The voices seemed to recede when he did that.

  The work was slow going. This wasn’t some action sim, where the hero just stabbed the door with a viral stick and walked in two seconds later. The passive scans failed. He’d have to go active, which would take more time, because he’d have to disguise the traffic so he didn’t trip any alerts. He was patient, though, and the hacking work seemed to push the voices to the edge of his mind. There was a rhythm to it.

  Eventually his scans found a weakness.

  He pulled the exploit into his backbrain and threaded it into mites that were just small enough to creep through microscopic holes in the Weaver’s shell. They wormed their way to its core, overcoming internal assaults by white blood cells and helper proteins and rewriting the software DNA, bringing down the gate. Quinlin slipped inside. A small man-trap was supposed to catch him if he got this far, but the exploit caused it to break down too. He waited for the second energy door to flicker and dashed through it. Now he was standing in a massive foyer, with spiral staircases swirling up to higher floors.

  He had the horrible feeling that he was being watched.

  For a moment he saw himself from a number of angles at once. It was disorienting, but he’d come this far and he kept going, shaking the hallucination off.

  Now that he was inside, his nano faced less assault. Defenses were always softer beyond firewalls. He let off a storm of mites to survey the place. A bunch of them died right away again. The tower’s immune systems were relentless. But a few of the bugs survived, soaring up through the space. He flipped on their defenses. It might agitate the building, trigger a real attack, so he had to be careful. He told the bugs to cycle shields if they faced attack. He wasn’t sure if it would work, but as he climbed the stairs quietly, they dipped and swerved and zoomed through every tiny crevice on the lower floors.

  Everything felt like it was pulsing. The hallucinations were coming fast and heavy. He kept seeing people, in different rooms. He didn’t know how but he had the sense this was real, that the rooms were real and that he was seeing them as they were right now. It made no sense. He saw faces, lots of them, a few dozen or more.

  He loaded up his gun hand to full power, its energy already surging through his augged veins. He turned up his sonic dampeners, but still felt the dizzying edge of paranoia creeping in from all sides. He reached the first landing and then the second. Heavy, ornate doors looked carved right into the dark interior, lit only by low hoverglobes. He saw a flash of a red room, filled with moving sculptures and huge paintings. Naked people stood or lounged in the room. And he felt like he could see from all their perspectives at once. He went down on one knee, trying to get a hold of himself. The Float was useless now. He could feel other minds pushing in on his. They were everywhere, all around him, closing in.

  And they knew he was here.

  He was crazy. He knew that now, but he didn’t care. He would find this woman and make her tell the truth. It would be up to Hoskin after that. Hoskin would get it done and solve the case. He always did. Quinlin was afraid. He missed his friend, wished he were here right now. He always had the answers. There was no question, he’d talk to Hoskin after this, get his help. No other way. He’d have to trust someone. The man always had the answers.

  And then the bugs found something. He stayed squatted down in the hall, unable to move, as the streams came online, ready to watch. His mind seemed to calm suddenly, its fractured bits like swirling particles in water that suddenly settled to the bottom. He could see and hear clearly, and he waited to make sure it would hold before he pulled up the mites’ streams. They tiled across his vision.

  At first what he was seeing and hearing didn’t make any sense. It just felt wrong. Felt off.

  Why the fuck are they talkin’ like that?

  There were ten or twenty people in a room. What they were saying sounded repetitive, like they were all saying the same thing at the same time, including the girl, Sakura. There she was. And for a second, he swore he could see through her eyes. Somehow he just knew she was a hundred floors up. He didn’t know how. He checked the mite’s position and confirmed it.

  And then he was sure he was looking through her eyes, and she looked down, towards where he was squatting on the lower floors. He shook the hallucination away and realized he’d been watching a stream a minute behind realtime. He skipped ahead in quick chunks and then stopped dead.

  Holy God.

  That’s when Quinlin’s head exploded in a pink mist.

  Inside Quinlin’s blackbox his customized deadman’s script triggered. It compressed up the last minute of his life and squirted it off to a private store he’d built from a cluster of old arrays and mem-cores. The connection was spotty in the woods and the mansion’s energy shields distorted the signal, but eventually the last minute of his life uploaded. After the script had fired off the last minute it started moving backwards to grab the minute before that. Compress. Squirt. Roll back. Compress. Squirt. It managed to upload about seven minutes before his blackbox was smashed.

  Under the Knife

  2437 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5135 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Rabbit

  The Black Opal, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  Venadrik didn’t like going under the knife. He'd always stood on the other side, looking down into the eyes of his victims. This was different, he knew. He’d have to face the knife himself.

  He’d meticulously sought out this black clinic, where they did surgeries off the books. Unregistered. That was the key.

  He’d pulled up black market med-clinics’ records under accounts of CII colleagues he’d hacked. He’d threaded in his own root privilege accounts before he’d changed his identity and faked his death, but those were only for emergencies. Better to use someone else�
�s credentials first, throw the blame in their direction. Officially, Venadrik was long gone, dead in an aircar accident.

  It always amazed him how horribly incompetent his colleagues were. They knew the basic security protocols. They were just too stupid to follow them. Venadrik watched and after a short time he knew who the easy marks were.

  Once he had the records, he sent a swarm of monitor bugs to watch each clinic. He’d altered the bugs himself in his lab. He’d crossed them with Habrobracon DNA, a parasitoid wasp that could withstand a massive 180,000 rads. That made them tougher than anything on the open market, tougher than any bugs except maybe the special forces nanosects and the ones the plutocrats in the sky could get their hands on. His bugs could soar through pulse shields by the hundreds and survive. It wouldn’t be enough to break through the cloud mansion defenses from the outside, but that didn’t matter. It was enough to break into the clinics, and this surgery would solve the problem of getting into the mansions once and for all.

  It didn’t take long to find the right clinic. Very quickly he saw who the double dealers were. He saw who used dirty instruments in disgusting bacteria-filled rooms. He saw who charged additional “service fees” after patients woke up at the tip of a gun. He saw who hacked apart their clients and sold their parts to the highest bidder.

  There were plenty of good ones, of course. The expensive ones. These were the upscale clinics the obscenely rich visited to get unauthorized mods and surgeries and implants. These were the places that made more money from their clients than they would from chopping them up for parts. The ones staffed with doctors who had lost their licenses on technicalities or because of vindictive patients or review board members, not because they’d raped a patient or killed through incompetence.

  Out of all of these, the Black Opal was the best: discreet, anonymous, clean, and they kept no records. Perfect. It was set in a massive old abandoned warehouse complex just outside the city.