by Jean Rabe
Ninn went flying against the opposite wall, the back of her head bouncing hard off the Plexiglas; the punch had been delivered with pile-driver strength. Not quite as big as a troll, the Slayer was definitely stronger than one; and more than muscle augmentation and bone lacing had to be involved. She’d boxed with augmented Lone Star officers in Chicago, and not even the biggest of them was capable of that.
Some ribs broke, she was sure of that. Wrist broke, Barega’s arm busted, and the hulking inhuman Slayer was healing. She pulled Mordred out again, raised him and fired again and again and again.
The Slayer laughed like a villain in a bad B movie.
“I’m going low!” Mordred shouted. “Careful, Keebs.”
“Great,” Ninn muttered. “Why didn’t you say something before now?”
“Because I thought you’d take him down before now.”
“Crap.” She wasn’t the best aim with her left hand.
“Good for one more burst, Keebs. Bullet to the Head, 2012, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Momoa.”
Ninn pushed to her feet just as Barega raised his good arm, palm out, and closed his eyes. Once more the Slayer was pushed back against the Plexiglas, and once more he roared.
Ninn wasn’t going to waste the shot while the force she couldn’t see kept him at bay. The bullet would bounce off like before. “Hold him as long as you can, Barega. I’ll try to get us out of here.”
The Slayer continued to rage.
“I will do my best, Nininuru. But this will not keep him—”
“—for long, I know.” She was almost at the opposite door, still moving faster than normal, when she whirled at a thunderous THRUM THRUM THRUM. Mordred still clenched in her left hand, she saw the beast hammering with both fists against the Plexiglas.
“Oh, hell no!” Ninn yelled.
The clear tunnel withstood water pressure; and in the news vids she’d never heard of it failing. But the Cross Slayer was more than troll-strong and pissed off to boot.
“I’m good for one shot, Keebs. This ain’t a good angle.”
“Then I’ll have to get close and make it count, eh?” Ninn took a deep breath and strode past Barega. “When I tell you, old man, get rid of your invisible wall.”
Barega’s voice was small behind her. “It is down, Ninn. That enchantment ran its course. He isn’t held by me. Not anymore.”
Gotta get him to face her, then. Gotta take the head shot. “One burst, eh, Mordred? Let’s make sure one is good enough.” The beast had an incredible healing factor, but she prayed a slug in his brain would stop that.
“Hey, ugly!” she hollered.
He continued hammering at the Plexiglas. Water bubbled in along a seam.
“Hey ugly, come and hit me instead!” She wanted him to face her, plug him in the center of his wide forehead. One shot, it had to be perfect. But when he wouldn’t turn—maybe he was so intent on busting the tunnel he didn’t hear her—she stepped to his side, held Mordred, and decided one to the temple would…
A fist slammed against the Plexiglas, the other drove at her so fast, an oil-black streak, knocking Mordred from her grip. The gun clattered away against the floor. The Slayer punched the tunnel wall again and the seam buckled, seawater sluiced in. At the same time Ninn planted her feet wide and hard, putting all her strength in her upper body. Only her left fist capable, she drove it forward, catching him under his arm. Again, she hit him, not lifting her legs because that would weaken her punches.
The Slayer made a keening sound, ignoring her and pulling his arms back, fingers interlaced into one big mallet of a fist that he brought down against the Plexiglas. The seam opened wide and the ocean poured in.
“Oh, hell no!” Ninn fought against the rush of water and followed with a jab, punch, uppercut, and hook, all with her left, and none doing anything. It was like punching a bag filled with wet duracrete. She turned and gave him a roundhouse kick to the back of his legs, which he answered with a swat that sent her reeling. A backhand sent her down to her knees and made her head spin.
Ninn bit her tongue hard in an effort to stay conscious, seeing Barega wobble, Benzo at his feet—
“Fetch!” she shouted to the dog spirit. “Fetch, Benzo! Fetch!”
Instantly the collection of furniture parts wiggled and yipped and scampered toward Mordred, the fabric tongue wrapping around the gun. “Fun fun fun. Fetch fetch fetch.”
The spirit raced to her side, dropped the gun in her outstretched hand. She raised it just as the Slayer bent over her, his hideous, fang-filled mouth open in a roar loud enough to wake the dead.
“Bam!” Mordred said as the round hit the Slayer in an eye socket. “And I’m out!”
The Slayer’s scream stopped short and he fell back, keg-sized legs twitching and fingers jumping like he was electrified.
“We should leave, Nininiru,” Barega suggested, his voice a whisper in the whoosh of the rising water. He was at the opposite door. “Can you open this, please?”
“Fun fun fetch,” Benzo said. “Good good dog.”
“The best dog.” Ninn was glad she’d never asked Barega how to dismiss a spirit. She gave the door a once-over. “No. I can’t open this…not without tools, stuff I have—had—in my office. It’s the same as the other door. Here’s the emergency release, and it’s fragged. They made sure we weren’t getting out.” She was equally sure someone was monitoring the tunnel. Draye and his dwarf crony had put the Slayer in here with them. They’d be able to open the doors from the other side…but they wouldn’t.
An accidental tunnel breach would dispose of her and Barega, yielding the same results Siland had apparently wanted by siccing the monstrocity on them. She wanted desperately to get out of this and put all the puzzle pieces in the right places.
“Panicking yet, Barega?”
The Aborigine didn’t say anything.
“I am,” she told him. “Definitely panicking.” Because a strong possibility existed they were going to drown.
The seam had opened wider wtill, water gushing in, up past their ankles now through the length of the very long tunnel. She slogged toward the Slayer, wanting to make sure he was really dead, stuffing Mordred in her pocket and crooking her neck to get Barega to follow her. He stumbled along, the broken arm no doubt painful, and maybe using his booga booga had taken a lot out of him, too. A glance at the seam, and she noted the tunnel walls on either side of it bulged ominously. The whole thing was going to give way, and soon.
“How the hell are we gonna get out here, Mordred?” She hadn’t expected him to answer. But he did as she knelt next to the manlike Slayer and prodded him with her good hand.
“Swim, Keebs. You go to the beach often enough, ya ken? Just swim.”
Not that easy. Bottom of the harbor, water jetting in like a firehose had been turned on. What was she looking for? Why was she messing with the body? The lights in the tunnel flickered, adding to the image that she was living an awful horror movie…and wouldn’t be living much longer. Why was she bothering with the corpse? She’d confirmed he was dead, and she had no desire to attempt to contact his spirit—that would be madness. Looked mostly human, in form anyway, the muscles hard and heavy, the skin black like oil but covered in fine black hair—all over, solid, like an animal. The ears small and flat against the sides of his head, a familiarity to them.
“What the hell were you?”
“Nininiru—” Barega had come up behind her.
She continued prodding. The water was over the body’s chest and it took her considerable effort to lift the shoulders to look at the face, her keen cybereye vision noting a thin strip along the jawline where there was no hair. Something there. She zoomed in. Renaixement C17 was tattooed in fine blue letters, like one might mark a cow.
“Moses on a moped.” She’d seen the word in the computer. Renaixement therapy in connection with research animals sent from the zoo to the Moon Corp.
“Nininiru—”
Somewhere else, too, she’d rea
d it. No, heard it. Accessing her coprocessor, she searched for the word. Asked Mordred to help.
“Keebs, we need to get out of here.”
“Hey, buddy. Renaixement. Where did I hear that before?”
“Not a clue,” Mordred answered. “The Great Escape, 1963, Steve McQueen.”
“Nininiru—” This time Barega jiggled her shoulder. She glanced up. He was wide-eyed and focused on the bulge in the tunnel wall, had apparently called up his booga booga again, because where the seam had ruptured and widened, the water flow had stopped. “I can’t…hold this…for long. The manifestation…was not meant…for such as this.”
“Renaixement, Mordred.”
“If you heard the word, it wasn’t when I was along. My memory’s perfect, Keebs,” Mordred continued, as if oblivious to the danger. “Perfect, 1985, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta. But I think The Great Escape is a better notion. Chicago, ya ken?”
So the RighteousRight bar, when she’d turned off Mordred’s smartlink, or in the alley when she first answered Cadi’s summons about his dead singer. She focused the coprocessor on that section of her memory, ignoring another shoulder poke by Barega.
A conversation replayed in her head: Gertie snorted. “Hand to mouth she lived, spending it all on Renaixement and slips and slips and more slips. Bad habit she had. Her debts were square, I think.”
Adoni/Ella Gance was associated with Renaixement…which was linked to the Slayer and the slain biologist who’d apparently headed up the project…which was somehow all involved with Siland and this aquarium and the zoo.
“Nininuru, we—”
The rest of the Aborigine’s words were drowned out by the rush of water as his enchantment and the Plexiglas tunnel gave in.
“Goodbye, Chicago,” Mordred said.
The sound was as loud a thing as Ninn had ever heard, but it lessened as the sea pressed in and dashed her against the floor. The entire Shark Walk disintegrated under the pressure of Sydney’s Darling Harbour. She barely had time to suck in a breath before the sea surged over her head and pushed her down.
The tunnel lights went out and the world went black. Then shadows intruded, her thermographic vision in her cybereye registering different heat signatures in the water. Large fish, nurse sharks from their shapes. Blood in the water from Barega’s broken arm, from the head wound to the Slayer which, thankfully, did not heal.
“Sharknado XLIII,” Mordred said. “Starring—” Then the smartlink cut out, shorted perhaps from the pounding saltwater.
A nurse shark nudged the Slayer.
She spotted Barega. The old man looked like a ragdoll held against the bottom of the broken tunnel. He wasn’t moving. Ninn fought against the pressure and reached him, wrapped the fingers of her good hand around his unbroken arm and pulled him close. Then she kicked up. The gun was right; she could swim, and was good at it. But that was under normal circumstances…when the water wasn’t beating at her and holding her down, where there weren’t an abundance of sharks, and when she wasn’t at the bottom of the harbor.
Sydney’s Darling Harbour was complex, ranging from three to forty five meters deep in holes. Fortunately the shark walk split the difference. Ninn scissored her legs and aimed up, brushing by a black-tipped shark that twisted as if it was going to pursue her. She shot through a school of blue devils and broke the surface, continuing to kick even though she feared that was the worse approach. She would be attracting the attention of the many predators, certainly the sharks.
But there was a big, easy meal at the bottom, the Cross Slayer, and for once luck found Ninn, and she made it to shore without losing a limb. Tugging Barega up, she started breathing for him, tipping his head so he could cough up the water.
“You need a hospital, old man.” She could use a good doc, too. Maybe Tarr, though she didn’t have anything left to pay the dwarf. Mordred was the only thing that had managed to stay in the pocket of her coat. The opal was gone, so were the slips, which would have melted oh-so-nicely right now.
Barega shook his head. “No…hospital. We are too busy for that, Nininiru.”
He didn’t say anything else until he woke at dawn, sitting between Ninn and Stinky Stella under the bridge, watching the mana storm throw random pink bolts of lightning down on the surface of the water.
“Are we going to the zoo?” he asked.
Twenty-Three
A Change of Clothes and Scenery
Ninn had ripped her raincoat into strips to make a bandage for her broken wrist, had made a splint for Barega from a broken pallet, using more strips from the coat to serve as a sling. There wasn’t anything worth saving left of the coat. The Aborigine had somehow slept through all of this, waking only a moment ago when a particularly loud boom of thunder shook the ground under the bridge and toppled a flowerpot off the roof of Stinky Stella’s box house. Ninn hadn’t been able to set his arm, which looked ugly, given the shattered ulna and radius, and which must have been quite painful. But she’d got the bleeding to stop, most of it anyway.
It looked like they’d been through a war.
Ninn thought it felt that way, though her trauma damper had started working again and kicked out enough endorphins and enkephalins to jazz her. Barega didn’t have the benefit of the tech.
“Good good dog.” Benzo sat on a pile of detritus that sloshed along the shore. The spirit looked well camouflaged amid the broken clutter.
“Yes,” Ninn agreed. “A very good good dog.” The outcome under the harbor might have turned out differently if the spirit dog hadn’t retrieved Mordred for the final shot.
The gun lay in her lap; she’d have to find some ammo somewhere. Dried out, the smartlink was working again.
“I’m going back to Cadigal’s,” she said.
“Seriously? That’s not a good move, Keebs. Siland might be there.”
“Which is why I need to go.”
“But I’m empty, remember?”
“I’ll work on that, Mordred.”
“Empty empty empty. Starving for some ammo here.”
Shanties stretched across a section of Darling Harbour near the bridge, some under a section of the span, a mix of colorful and drab floating hovels where an assortment of raggedy people lived. They couldn’t be called homeless exactly, as the hovels served as their homes. But they were a collective blight on an otherwise beautiful part of Sydney. A bolt of pink lightning came down and vaporized one.
“But I want to go back at night, Mordred, when the neighborhood’s darker and the right crowd is out. Better chance of finding Siland then, I’m guessing. Easier to hide in all the shadows.”
“Shouldn’t go back until I’ve got some ammo, Keebs. You can’t shoot anyone by pointing your finger at ’em. You never bought that attachment.”
“It’s on my list. I have to get some nuyen first, Mordred. Nuyen, then ammo.”
“I knew Cadigal’s grandfather.” It was the first Stinky Stella had spoken since she’d helped pull Barega out of the water. “He died up on that bridge in one of the bad storms, turned into one more rivet. But he was old and on his way out anyway.” She blew out a deep breath that smelled awful, and then yawned, showing her rotted teeth. “His grandson was too young to be geeked, though. Pity.”
“Cadi was a friend of mine,” Ninn said absently.
“So I’ll help. But you make it up to me sometime, understand? I like pressies.” Stinky Stella retreated into her box and came out with four credsticks. “I find these things from time to time, an’ I spend ’em when I go up the bank and want a night out, something new to wear.” Ninn suspected the woman had not changed clothes in a few years. “But you use these to get you some bullets and better threads, understand? Cover up some of that skin. And you make it up to me sometime.” She huffed and sat again. “Make it up real good, and she’ll be apples.”
Ninn focused to keep from retching at the woman’s stench. “I’ll make it up to you, Stella. Promise.”
“Promises! Promises! 1963, Jay
ne Mansfield.”
Ninn extended a hand and helped Barega up. “You need a hospital,” she repeated as she tugged him up the bank. The pink lightning had stopped, and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. The cloud over the city had turned a shimmering pink in places, and the sky was full of birds.
“I need a hospital?” He stared at her bandaged wrist. “We need to go to the zoo.”
The credsticks had a lot on them, more than enough to put her in a new, chic “urban mystic” outfit, nothing she’d normally wear, and that might help her continue to hide in plain sight. It was something made by Aztechnology and no doubt helpful to street mages, every shade of brown in the world cut through with a green pattern that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs and seemed to complement her Aboriginal-design facial tattoos. It had a single deep pocket that Mordred and some spare clips fit into nicely, and an attached hood draped down her back. Ninn hoped she could keep the clothes intact; she liked them.
She put Barega in navy blue alley punk garb, one step above what a banger would wear, with a half cape that fell over his arm and a broad-brimmed slouch hat that shaded his face. There was enough nuyen left to get some ammunition for Mordred and to pay for their entrance into the zoo, some unhealthy food at one of the stands, and cover a couple of nights in a halfway decent hotel—though the mattress in the furniture store had been comfortable and free.
“You’re going to the hospital after the zoo,” she told him.
“And you are not my mother, Nininiru Tossinn.”
“And what do you hope to find at the zoo?” Mordred asked.
“Some answers,” Ninn replied. “Like what the hell Renaixement is. And is that one word at the heart of why Adoni and the others had been killed? Renaixement. What the bloody blue blazes is it?”
Barega gave her an odd look. She knew he still hadn’t cobbled on to the fact that her one-sided conversations weren’t really one-sided.