The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  I chopped down savagely from head height, left and right. My left fist jarred into the pistoleer’s temple with enough force to break the bone and he slumped sideways with a single grunt. He never even saw the blow coming. My right arm was still in motion.

  The synthetic whipped around, probably faster than I could have struck, but she misread me. Her arm was raised to block and cover her head, and I was under the guard, reaching. My hand closed on the blaster at her belt, knocked out the safety and triggered it. The beam seethed into life, cutting downwards, and a large quantity of the woman’s right leg burst open in wet ropes of flesh before the blowback circuits cut the blast. She howled, a cry more of rage than of pain, and then I dragged the muzzle of the weapon up, triggering another blast diagonally across her body. The blaster carved a channel a handsbreadth wide right through her and into the seat behind. Blood exploded across the cabin.

  The blaster cut out again and the cabin went suddenly dim as the flaring of the beam weapon stopped. Beside me, the synthetic woman bubbled and sighed, and then the section of her torso that the head was attached to sagged away from the left side of the body. Her forehead came to rest against the window she had been looking out of. It looked oddly as if she was cooling her brow on the rain-streaked glass. The rest of the body sat stiffly upright, the massive sloping wound cauterised clean by the beam. The mingled stink of cooked meat and fried synthetic components was everywhere.

  ‘Trepp? Trepp?’ It was the chauffeur’s intercom squawking. I wiped blood out of my eyes and looked at the screen set in the forward bulkhead.

  ‘She’s dead,’ I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster. ‘They’re both dead. And you’re next, if you don’t get us on the ground right now.’

  The chauffeur rallied. ‘We’re five hundred metres above the Bay, friend, and I’m flying this car. What do you propose doing about that?’

  I selected a mid-point on the wall between the two cabins, knocked out the blowback cutout on the blaster and shielded my face with one hand.

  ‘Hey, what are you—’

  I fired through into the driver’s compartment on tight focus. The beam punched a molten hole about a centimetre wide and for a moment it rained sparks backwards into the cabin as the armouring beneath the plastic resisted. Then the sparks died as the beam broke through and I heard something electrical short out in the forward compartment. I stopped firing.

  ‘The next one goes right through your seat,’ I promised. ‘I’ve got friends who’ll re-sleeve me when they fish us out of the Bay. You I’ll carve into steaks right through this fucking wall, and even if I miss your stack, they’ll have a hard time finding which part of you it’s inside, now fucking get me on the ground.’

  The limousine banked abruptly to one side, losing altitude. I sat back a little amidst the carnage and cleaned more blood off my face with one sleeve.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said more calmly. ‘Now set me down near Mission Street. And if you’re thinking about signalling for help, think about this. If there’s a firefight, you die first. Got it? You die first. I’m talking about real death. I’ll make sure I burn out your stack if it’s the last thing I do before they take me down.’

  His face looked back at me on the screen, pale. Scared, but not scared enough. Or maybe scared of someone else. Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of longheld obedience through hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s how you fight wars, after all - with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

  I used to be like that myself.

  ‘How about this?’ I offered rapidly. ‘You violate traffic protocol putting us down. The Sia turn up, bust you and hold you. You say nothing. I’m gone and they’ve got nothing on you outside of a traffic misdemeanour. Your story is you’re just the driver, your passengers had a little disagreement in the back seat and then I hijacked you to the ground. Meanwhile, whoever you work for bails you out rapido and you pick up a bonus for not cracking in virtual holding.’

  I watched the screen. His expression wavered, and he swallowed hard. Enough carrot, time for the stick. I locked the blowback circuit on again, lifted the blaster so he could see it and fitted it to the nape of Trepp’s neck.

  ‘I’d say you’re getting a bargain.’

  At point-blank range, the blaster beam vaporised spine, stack and everything around it. I turned back to the screen.

  ‘Your call.’

  The driver’s face convulsed, and the limo started to lose height raggedly. I watched the flow of traffic through the window, then leaned forward and tapped on the screen.

  ‘Don’t forget that violation, will you?’

  He gulped and nodded. The limo dropped vertically through stacked lanes of traffic and bumped hard along the ground, to a chorus of furious collision alert screeches from the vehicles around us. Through the window I recognised the street I’d cruised with Curtis the night before. Our pace slowed somewhat.

  ‘Crack the nearside door,’ I said, tucking the blaster under my jacket. Another jerky nod and the door in question clunked open, then hung ajar. I swivelled, kicked it wide and heard police sirens wailing somewhere above us. My eyes met the driver’s on the screen for a moment and I grinned.

  ‘Wise man,’ I said, and threw myself out of the coasting vehicle.

  The pavement hit me in the shoulder and back as I rolled amidst startled cries from passing pedestrians. I rolled twice, hit hard against a stone frontage and climbed cautiously to my feet. A passing couple stared at me and I skinned my teeth in a smile that made them hurry on, finding interest in other shop fronts.

  A stale blast of displaced air washed over me as a traffic cop’s cruiser dropped in the wake of the offending limo. I stayed where I was, giving back the diminishing handful of curious looks from passers-by who had seen my unorthodox arrival. Interest in me was waning, in any case. One by one the stares slipped away, drawn by the flashing lights of the police cruiser, now hovering menacingly above and behind the stationary limo.

  ‘Turn off your engines and remain where you are,’ crackled the airborne speaker system.

  A crowd started to knot up as people hurried past me, jostling and trying to see what was going on. I leaned back on the frontage, checking myself for damage from the jump. By the feel of the fading numbness in my shoulder and across my back, I’d done it right this time.

  ‘Raise your hands above your head and step away from your vehicle,’ came the metallic voice of the traffic cop.

  Over the bobbing heads of the spectators, I made out the driver, easing himself out of the limo in the recommended posture. He looked relieved to be alive. For a moment I caught myself wondering why that kind of stand-off wasn’t more popular in the circles I moved in.

  Just too many death wishes all round, I guess.

  I backstepped a few metres in the mix of the crowd, then turned and slipped away into the brightly lit anonymity of the Bay City night.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here - it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal executio
n with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.’

  QUELLCRIST FALCONER Things I Should Have Learnt by Now Volume II

  There was a cold blue dawn over the city by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen of recent rain. I stood in the shadow of the expressway pillars and watched the gutted street for any hint of movement. There was a feeling I needed, but it wasn’t easy to come by in the cold light of the rising day. My head was buzzing with rapid data assimilation and Jimmy de Soto floated around in the back of my mind like a restless demon familiar.

  Where are you going, Tak?

  To do some damage.

  The Hendrix hadn’t been able to give me anything on the clinic I’d been taken to. From Deek’s promise to the Mongolian to bring a disc of my torture right back across, I supposed that the place had to be on the other side of the Bay, probably in Oakland, but that in itself wasn’t much help, even for an AI. The whole Bay area appeared to be suffused with illegal biotech activity. I was going to have to retrace my steps the hard way.

  Jerry’s Closed Quarters.

  Here the Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife, and went out to do some interrogating of my own.

  I’d seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.

  Jerry’s Closed Quarters by dawn light.

  What little cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her religion would not let her come back from.

  Make it personal.

  The Nemex was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.

  The door robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.

  ‘We’re closed, friend,’ the synth voice said.

  I levelled the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled from the shattered lintel housing.

  Cautiously, I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as he saw me.

  ‘You. What—’

  I shot him through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me, took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his fingers touched the weapon.

  At the bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spiderweb holo with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security presence for the cabins - three at most, more likely down to two at this time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.

  Jerry the cheapskate.

  I listened, cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the floor.

  The doors to the bar remained closed.

  I eased my head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her forehead.

  ‘You work security for Jerry?’

  She nodded, eyes flaring white around her irises.

  ‘One chance. Where is he?’

  ‘Bar,’ she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. ‘Table. Back corner.’

  I nodded, stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.

  ‘Wait, you—’

  The Philips gun sighed.

  Damage.

  I was in the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him in, still firing.

  It was a wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deek, reeling backwards with his hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a speed that was truly semi-divine.

  I heard the dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim, bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward, clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar - no time to turn and aim - and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun, half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched him back onto the dance platform.

  The Nemex echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.

  By now I had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.

  ‘Wise man.’ The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. ‘Leave your hands right there, and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at the wrist.’

  He sank back into his seat, f
ace working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing. Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.

  At this, Jerry erupted.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—’

  I jerked the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up. Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then straddled it, facing him.

  ‘You, Jerry,’ I said evenly, ‘need to listen to people occasionally. I’ve told you, my name is not Ryker.’

  ‘Whoever the fuck you are, I’m connected.’ There was so much venom on the face before me it was a wonder Jerry didn’t choke on it. ‘I’m jacked into the fucking machine, you get me? This. All this. You’re going to fucking pay. You’re going to wish—’

  ‘I’d never met you,’ I finished for him. I stowed the empty Philips gun back in its Fibregrip holster. ‘Jerry, I already wish I’d never met you. Your sophisticated friends were sophisticated enough for that. But I notice they didn’t tell you I was back on the street. Not so tight with Ray these days, is that it?’

  I was watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried again.

  ‘Trepp’s dead,’ I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. ‘Trepp, and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?’

  His mouth tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel of the Nemex up against his left eye.