by Anthology
My grip tightened on the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.
I studied Courtney out of the corner of my eye. She was hugging her knees to herself, her shoulders shaking, her ponytail falling across her and hiding her face.
She was involved in this somehow.
“What aren’t you telling me?” The words came out too harsh. I didn’t care. “Those men at your place were looking for something. What was it?”
She raised a blotchy, tear-streaked face to look at me. “I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”
Right.
My client might be lying to me. My client, who was already on the run not only from the authorities, but from a drug cartel who wanted her dead, government men in dark suits, a dirty cop, and some unknown player willing to commit arson and murder to cover its tracks.
And, on top of everything, I’d lost my information broker. I tried not to think about Penny, the twelve-year-old kick-ass hacker who’d been taught to pay her taxes on time.
Courtney cried softly in the passenger seat the whole way to the bolt hole I drove us to. If she was playing a part, laying it on thick in the hopes I’d buy the tearful façade, she deserved some sort of acting award.
Maybe she really was just a naïve kid who had gotten in too deep, too scared or too stupid to tell me what was going on.
Still, the crying pissed me off. What right did she have to sob her eyes out for people she’d barely met and seemed to judge from moment one? “For Christ’s sake,” I growled, as I swung the car into a grimy alleyway. “You didn’t even know them.”
“How can you be so cold?” she murmured tremulously.
I slammed the car’s transmission into park. “Are you feeling guilty? Is that it?”
Tears swam in her red-rimmed eyes. “Guilty? Why would I—” Her face contorted in horror. Could someone really fake that? “This was about us? Oh, God—that was only this morning!”
Maybe I could turn her guilt to my advantage, I thought. Come at her from the side, maneuver her into revealing whatever she was hiding—
The thought was exhausting. I wasn’t any good with people, and I definitely wasn’t good at subtlety. I could threaten her, but…
Courtney rubbed the ends of her sleeves across her face, sniffling.
She was just a kid. Or near enough. Even I wasn’t willing to go there, at least not yet.
I picked up the file from Anton and the paper bag of money with stiff hands, and we got out of the car. The alleyway ended at a rusted back door; I led the way up a narrow, dark stairwell that climbed into a dilapidated second-floor loft. The furnishings were basic: mattress in the corner, some boxes with food and water in them, not much else.
I dug through one of the drawers in the kitchenette area where I remembered having thrown medical supplies and unearthed a bottle of expired sleeping pills, which I tossed at Courtney. “Here. Take those and get some rest.”
“I don’t like drugs,” she said unhappily.
I didn’t comment on the irony of that.
She swallowed the pills dry and stumbled over to the pallet in the corner. “Where are we?” she slurred, the drugs already kicking in.
“A safe place,” I said. “I have a few around the city. Keep them stocked, in case I need to lie low.”
She cocked her head at me for a long moment, smearing her sleeve across her face again, her eyes glazed. “You’re scary.”
Her frankness took me aback. “You hired me to get you out of all this, remember?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she mumbled. “I wish…” She was already starting to slump into a doze, her exhaustion combining with the pills.
“What do you wish?” Maybe, with her half-conscious state, I could get her to tell me something she otherwise wouldn’t have.
“I wish I didn’t need someone like you,” she said, and her eyes slid closed.
Yeah. Sure. I was the bad guy here.
I left my client a docile, snoozing form on the blankets, grateful for the respite. My stupid body was starting to feel the last thirty hours, but I rummaged through the drawers again and found a box of caffeine pills. I ached for a shower and a quick nap, but first I needed to see if I could put together what Anton had found—what he might have died for.
The file was thin. I pulled the lone stool in the flat up to the kitchenette counter and opened it, turning over the first few sheets of disconnected information and wondering how I would make sense of them, only to be hit in the face by a blandly unassuming document: a funding memo from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I sat and stared at it, feeling as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me.
Pithica was a project. Possibly a highly classified government project. I closed my eyes, trying to get a grip. It could be anything, I told myself. The United States has any number of operations the population doesn’t know about; it could be anything. Anything…
I saw lab coats and red tile in my mind’s eye. Whispers of weapons and a better future. I slammed down on the vision before my imagination ran away with me.
It could be anything.
There was a reason why I stayed off the government’s radar. Why I didn’t like the police, why I willfully ignored the law, why I didn’t have a Social Security card, why—unlike Anton—I refused to pay taxes, aside from the obvious. The government scared me. Too many secrets. Too many bits of darkness I’d seen hints of over the years.
People with that much power…too big. Too dangerous.
Too real.
What was I getting into?
I forced myself to keep looking through the other documents. The Senate memo only referenced the word “Pithica” incidentally, as if the mention had slipped in by accident, and included no details on the mission of the project or who might be running it. I rifled through the rest of the pages: a report of an investigation into California dock workers’ conditions, marked with a post-it that said it had come up in cross-referencing; a transcript from a radio transmission with half the text blacked out, giving no clear reference points; another memo with the phrase “Halberd and Pithica”—Halberd must be another project, but I found no other mentions of the word…
A few other documents turned up similarly frustrating bits and pieces. The file proved Pithica existed—or had existed; the most recent document dated from more than five years ago—but nothing more. Underneath the last page was a note in Anton’s blocky handwriting: “Should be more. Dead ends. Scrubbed? Will keep digging.”
The papers had no reference to Colombian drug cartels or anything else connected to Courtney Polk, and no hint of why the LAPD—or any other local police force, for that matter—would be looking into this.
I sat back. What did I know? The dirty cop chasing after us had expected me to have information on Pithica. He had followed us from the compound, which meant the cartel was involved somehow, and he had also said that if I didn’t talk, then he’d expected Courtney to be able to answer his questions.
Why? As far as the cartel’s chain of command went, Courtney Polk had been rock bottom. What did the cop think she knew? If this was about drugs, why had the cop come after her rather than anyone higher up?
And who were the people who’d been at Courtney’s house? The suits and the way they operated had screamed government-type, which fit with what Anton’s intelligence had revealed, but at least two of them had been European. What had they wanted from Courtney?
Every piece of this mess pointed back at my skinny twenty-three-year-old and her hard luck story. Either Courtney Polk had lied to me from the first moment I met her, or a whole slew of people, from the dirty cop to the Dark Suits, were mistaken about her importance.
And I knew someone who might be able to tell me which it was. Someone who could give me an idea whether I should be protecting my new charge or pulling a gun in her face and demanding answers. Someone who, if Courtney was more than the naïve kid she seemed, might have had ulterior motives about sending me on this mad chase in the
first place.
I picked up the phone.
“I said don’t get involved,” said Rio flatly by way of greeting.
“Answer me one question.” I glanced over to the corner, where my would-be client was curled up into a ball and wheezing lightly in her sleep. “Did you have some other reason for sending me after Courtney Polk?”
Heavy silence deadened the line. Then Rio said, “Who?”
***
This concludes the excerpt of ZERO SUM GAME available in this anthology. If you are interested in the full book or its sequels, please visit www.slhuang.com for information and links.
Kurt Hunt
Paolo, Friend Paolo(Short story)
by Kurt Hunt
First published at Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 2015), edited by Andrew Leon Hudson
The stars were wrong.
The Navigator emerged into the grip of an unexpected gravity well. Everything behind the first narrowed pinch of her wasp-like body was numb and unresponsive.
She was their link to new worlds, bred and engineered to carry the Seed—but this was not her destination, not the dull brown ashen planet targeted for reformation. Instead, her guidance whips trailed limp into an exosphere overwhelming with vivid compounds and colors. Even from this distance, the continents spreading like stains beneath her black armor, it smelled of water and oxygen. A rich home, however unplanned.
The Navigator tried to orient herself, but her neural pathways had burned in transit. She tried to swing into orbit, the same instinctive and graceful swoop she had performed thousands of times, but her thin, ebon limbs hung paralyzed beneath her as she lurched closer to the stink of ozone.
The Sisterhood had prepared her for this. We often break, they sang, and instilled in her a love of the hard victory. But the reality of glorious exile exhumed thoughts of a familiar sun. She stretched toward empty space as if mere proximity could return to her the sounds and smells of land, the faces lost to her, the feel of wind on unarmored skin.
But home was far. Duty remained. Falling toward the planet, she sang the paean—We Bring Life, Even In Death—and exulted. Only the best of them were sent into the dark. And she was not yet broken.
She prepared the Seed to complete its task without her.
***
The ocean spit salt against the boat, fanning huge arcs over the heads of its two passengers. The first man—whom everyone thought of as “Friend” Paolo, if they thought of him at all—squinted and turned away from the primal churn of foam and spray. His suit was soaked through, warping until the pinstripes resembled ocean swells.
He wrung the water from his tie and held it in front of him like a clump of hair pulled from a drain. “I either need Kiton to make me a wetsuit,” he said, “or I need a heads up on these inspections, so I can stop playing Jacques Cousteau in hand-stitched wool.”
The other man—simply called Paolo—only stared ahead, the dusking sun reflected white on his narrow spectacles. He leaned forward, rigid as an owl preparing to drop onto its prey.
“Look at it,” said Paolo.
A few kilometers ahead, a sliver of gray cut through the mist just above the horizon. The beginnings of a floating city, brick and steel perched like mountains atop an abandoned oil platform—the core of an alternative energy research facility—planted against the winds and whitecaps of the Pacific.
As usual, the scale of Paolo’s plan was unprecedented. The press called the project “audacious” and, in light of Paolo’s (and Friend Paolo’s) track record, declared the promised results an imminent disruption of the energy sector. Friend Paolo smiled and agreed—“Paolo is a visionary; I’m proud to work for him”—but silently he gnawed on logistics.
Details were his domain. Paolo envisaged the untapped potential of an off-shore location for solar, wind, and kinetic tidal energy, but it was Friend Paolo who found a viable site and navigated international bureaucracies. Paolo identified his “dream team” of researchers and engineers; Friend Paolo recruited them, got contracts signed, kept them invested in the project. Where Paolo saw concept, Friend Paolo saw construction. Complication.
It had taken two months to reinforce and stabilize the platform, another six weeks to install the panels that concealed its exposed steel skeleton. Two weeks ago, the north pylon cracked; three days later, the south. At every step: delay, disaster, death. Yesterday, two welders fell from their perch after a rogue wave reached up from the froth and swatted them like insects. They were fished out, swollen and gray, but had lost all their equipment. And today, the waves had grown sharp like teeth.
“It’s beautiful,” said Friend Paolo.
“It’s shit!” Paolo’s hands were clutched together in front of him and turning white. In this wide expanse, his voice sounded thinner than normal. “Look at the scarring! I’m trying to birth a child and you give me a crew of ax-fisted monsters to play midwife.”
Through the hammering saltspray, Friend Paolo saw a cluster of seams curving across the custom-tempered, maraging steel. It was Frankensteinian; not at all the smooth, easy aesthetic that Paolo required.
Material costs and repair times wheeled through Friend Paolo’s head, an impossible arithmetic. And he remembered, not for the first time, what the general contractor had told them, just before Paolo fired him: “It can’t be done; the ocean will eat it.”
He wilted against the side of the boat, but said only, “We can fix this. It’ll destroy the budget, but we can fix it.”
Paolo snorted. “The money’s not the problem.”
And Friend Paolo knew that was true. Everyone knew that was true.
Paolo’s great-grandfather had made a fortune building telegraph cables like spiderwebs between the coastal cities. Paolo’s grandfather, impatient and impulsive and consequently cut out of the family business, had made more fortunes tapping his father’s lines and blackmailing almost every moneyed family in Baja and Southern California. Paolo’s father did nothing of note, but he spent little and risked less, and as a result he did not lose those great fortunes before he died of a heart attack, alone in his walk-in closet. Now, with the help of the friend he had overshadowed since childhood, Paolo was determined to use that money to make the world remember him.
They arrived at the docking floats, which constantly adjusted to the surface swell. High above them, subcontractors clung to the sides of the oil platform like moss, welding, hammering, cutting.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Friend Paolo.
“Of course you will.” Paolo stared at him, his glasses mirrors. “Clean slate.”
Wind sucked the air from Friend Paolo’s lungs. A clean slate meant a new team, from the GC down. His mental timetables crumbled. Money might not be a problem, but time…Paolo was always very strict about time. “Let me talk to them. Maybe—”
“I get it. This is the good cop, bad cop routine? I keep you around because you’re ballast?” Paolo stepped onto the dock, his back to the boat, and shook his head. “That’s not it at all. You’re the mortar. I’m the pestle.”
Friend Paolo bit his upper lip, looked down, and waited.
The steady thump of the boat against the dock counted out the seconds as Paolo walked to the access ladder. “Gather everyone,” he said, not bothering to look back. “Fire everyone. Erase everyone. Build the fucking thing already.” He climbed, and as he climbed he grew smaller, blurrier, and finally disappeared over the top.
Friend Paolo sat and listened to the foreign sounds of the sea, lost in numbers and dates, internalizing his friend’s directions, and working as always to discern how to bend the world to their needs.
Between the white noise pulse of waves, men’s voices drifted up like kites.
***
The strange planet grew larger.
The Navigator tried to cry out, to sing, but she could no longer feel others like herself. Instead of the constant neutrino-chatter of her sisters calling out their discoveries f
rom distant stars, silence. Instead of the calm of a dead system waiting for the life she carried, the howl and shriek of radio waves.
Instead of the freeze of space, the burn of re-entry.
***
One moment, the platform swarmed with workers. Then, against the sunset, a coiling blackness fell and the world erupted. Paolo and Friend Paolo crouched like animals before it.
The detonation seemed to hang forever, a fortress of water and shadow so tall it consumed the sky, its movement betrayed only by the spit and froth playing along the top. But deep within, Friend Paolo saw—whether imagination or lightplay—a dark monstrosity, like an enormous insect, and ebon whips lashing against the sides of the wave, again and again and again—until it broke and fell like Jericho.
***
Friend Paolo returned to the world embryonic—curled and weightless. He tried to breathe but instead sucked saltwater, felt it burn down his throat and into his lungs. He flailed and kicked and clawed until, somehow, he broke out and rediscovered air. And blackness.
Night had fallen. Pale light decanted from the moon and stars—so many stars!—to illuminate the sea, his hands—everything—a strange, unvarying silver.
But the boat was gone. Paolo was gone. And before him, the harsh geometry of the platform, the only possible sanctuary, had been defeated. Two pylons had buckled. The outer walls had crumpled, revealing fractured support beams through jagged gaps, like mouths full of broken teeth. The platform itself, built to withstand even the most violent of anticipated natural disasters, had fallen. One side listed down and into the water, and the surface of it—where people had labored, where a city was to be built—was dull and gray and scraped clean.
He was halfway to that poor chance of refuge, wincing with each stroke, when he realized: even the oceanic swell was gone. Only his feeble paddling distorted the surface and its reflection of the ruin.
It was only after he reached the platform and pulled himself from the water that he saw any sign of life, any hint that the world survived. There: a small dark smudge against the grey field of metal emerging from the ocean.