by John Helfers
The elemental obeyed: like a small but powerful tsunami, it sped across the sea, releasing Thresher just as it reached the shoreline and propelling him into the trunk of a lodgepole pine with damaging force. The SEAL picked himself up, taking two unsteady steps on his finned feet, then fell face-down into the mud. He picked himself up with some difficulty, then turned his head to see a pair of boots less than a meter away. He looked up, and saw 8-Ball standing over him, brandishing a piece of driftwood the approximate size and shape of an executioner’s axe. The dwarf grinned, then brought the heavy cudgel down on Thresher’s head with all of his strength.
• • •
When Magnusson swam ashore three minutes later, carrying Mute and assisted by the water elemental, 8-ball was sitting beside his unconscious foe. Thresher’s wrists and ankles were bound together with duct tape from Zurich’s pocket, and 8-Ball had donned his web belt and was admiring his gyrojet pistol. He looked up as Magnusson, chanting in Aramaic to center himself and reduce the drain of his magic use, gently lay Mute down on the sand. “Is she okay?” he asked.
The magician nodded wearily.
“You?”
Magnusson sat down, and looked at Zurich, raising an eyebrow.
“Stable,” said the weapons master. “I’ve called DocWagon, and they should be here soon.”
“You?
“Never felt better,” said 8-Ball, grinning. “Just been SEAL clubbing.”
Magnusson groaned at the pun, and lay down on the beach.
“Mute said you were the best,” the dwarf said, more seriously. “She was right.”
The magician didn’t reply.
“We’ve got another job coming up,” 8-Ball continued. “Datasteal from Mitsuhama’s magical research. Should be interesting. You want in?”
Magnusson stared up at the sky, then closed his eyes. He planned to secretly give his share of the reward for Thresher to Kenda Reyes so that she could continue her research, but he knew it might not be enough. “Maybe,” he said. “But only if it doesn’t involve any wetwork.”
The Good Fight
By Marc Tassin
Marc Tassin was enthralled by books from an early age. He marveled that a collection of letters on a page could sweep a person away to another world, change the course of a life, or evoke any number of emotional and intellectual responses. The power of this literary alchemy is what inspired him to try his hand at writing, although it is the joy of sharing his work with others that drives him today. Marc lives in a small town just outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife, Tanya, and their two children.
“Outta the way, grandpa.”
The two gangers muscled past Kaine, shoving him aside as they struggled out to the waiting GAZ-P pickup with the decade old trid console. Near the apartment building steps, groups of people, most still in their pajamas, stood huddled together. Some were crying, some stared steely-eyed at the gang members, while others just watched in quiet resignation.
Kaine ignored it all. He shoved his hands a little further into the pockets of his battered trench and made his way past the huddled masses, up the steps, and into the decaying apartment building he’d made his squat a couple of years back.
Inside, he stepped around another ganger who had the young couple from 4C at gunpoint and pinned against the wall. They were wearing their links, and they punched shaking fingers at the air in front of them.
“That’s right,” the ganger said. “And transfer those trid speakers too. If any of you slots get it in your head to call Knight Errant, I want it nice and clear that you sold us this stuff.”
“Can’t beat the price!” shouted another ganger as he went past with an armful of clothing.
Kaine had seen this before. Gang hits a building at night, forces everybody outside, and cleans out their squats. The twist on this one is that they force all the residents to legally sell the stuff to the gangers for a song using their links. The gangers pay a couple of nuyen and walk away with a pile of stuff. And of course none of the folks they hit have enough nuyen or status to prove otherwise. Instead they just eat it and move on, saving that call to Knight Errant for important stuff, like murder. Course here in Detroit, anyone outside “the Wall” knows it’s a lucky break if the Knights show up even for that. Kaine had seen a corpse rot in an alley for a week before a Knight Errant cruiser finally appeared to check it out.
Kaine made it to his apartment unmolested. An old man in a battered trench coat was easy to ignore. Granted, he was a little bulkier than most men his age, and the hard lines of his face, half-hidden in the shadows of his wide-brimmed hat, might have given the punks pause. Fortunately, gangers weren’t known for their observation skills.
The door to his squat hung by one hinge, and the new maglock he’d installed a couple weeks earlier lay on the floor, twisted and bent. Frowning, Kaine stepped over the wreckage and surveyed the damage. As expected, it was his old trid he’d seen them hauling out. The soy processor was gone too, as well as the projection window he’d picked up last year. They hadn’t taken his collection of turn of the century CDs, but probably not knowing what they were they’d made sure to smash the hell out of them. Kaine grimaced as he stepped over the glittering shards of his collector’s edition copy of the Best of the White Stripes.
None of that concerned him. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to start over, and it wouldn’t be the last. He’d made provisions for this sort of thing and had more than enough nuyen to cover it. Even the CDs weren’t a big deal. Hunting for them in the various online auction houses was more than half the fun anyhow.
Kaine was worried about something more important.
He reached the bedroom and found exactly what he was afraid of. Lying on the floor in a slowly expanding pool of blood lay Alvin. Alvin was a mixed breed, but he’d had the look and temperament of a lab. Kind, happy, a friend who would never turn on you. Not only that, but he was an honest-to-god dog. Not some vat job or Japanese clone or Chinese synthound. It didn’t take a vet to tell Kaine the old boy was done for.
Kaine stooped beside Alvin and ran his gloved hand along the dog’s side. Glassy, dead eyes stared up at him, the hound’s pink tongue lolling out to one side and streaked with red. Kaine heard footsteps behind him.
“Watchoo doin’, old man?”
He recognized the voice as that of the ganger he’d stepped around coming in.
“You didn’t have to shoot him,” Kaine said without turning. “He was a good dog. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone.”
Kaine heard the distinctive slide and snap of an MP-5 cocking lever moving into firing position.
“Shut yer slot,” the ganger growled. “Grab yer link, and get out here. We got business to do.”
Kaine’s vision blurred, and he felt an old itch in his back that he’d almost forgotten about. He’d put up with a lot of shit over the years, but this was too much. These little bastards didn’t respect anything. It was going to be the same damn thing again and again and again.
Kaine stood, avoiding any sudden moves. Instead of turning, he stepped to the nightstand.
“I need my medicine,” he said, reaching for the drawer.
“Get away from there!”
Still facing the nightstand Kaine froze but continued speaking, his voice calm and low, “I need my heart medicine. If I die, who’s gonna do the transaction?”
The ganger took a long moment to think about this. Kaine gave him time to puzzle it out.
“Fine! Grab yer shit, and let’s go,” the ganger yelled.
Kaine opened the drawer and reached inside. Turning his hand over, he reached up and grasped the Ares Predator he kept secured there with MagnoTape.
With a sharp mental command he hadn’t used in almost eight years, Kaine tripped his wired reflexes. The jolt to his system was one part excruciating pain and one part ecstasy. The world slowed to a crawl as his body was ripped from the realm of normal human perception and into a place where nanoseconds stretched out long enough to make
a blink a temporary blackout.
As he spun around he could see that the ganger was wired too. Most likely he had one of those new Mitsuhama rigs. Twice as fast and half the cost of the ancient hardwire Renraku system Kaine was running. The ganger opened up with his SMG, but Kaine was already dropping to a crouch. The stream of bullets perforated the wall behind him, cutting his favorite Poker Dogs painting in two. The ganger was all jitter and no jive. Like a drivers ed student behind the wheel of a Lamborghini.
As Kaine dropped he brought the predator around, popped the safety, and squeezed the trigger once, twice.
Twin thunderclaps roared. The first bullet caught the ganger square in the chest and sent his arms flying out in front of him. The second round hit right between the eyes, snapping the ganger’s neck back and coating the room behind him with a design that would have made Jackson Pollock jealous.
Kaine had already crossed the room before the body hit the floor. His hat flew off, revealing the wiry brush cut he’d worn since serving in the UCAS Marines back in the ’30s. The only difference was that it had faded to a steel gray over the past few decades.
Kaine stopped beside the body and looked at the corpse.
“You can steal the things a man holds dear. You can burn down his home. You can even take a man’s life. But never, ever, fuck with a man’s dog.”
• • •
By the time Kaine reached the apartment door, he could hear the shit hitting the fan. The gangers were shouting to one another, kids were crying, and some lady had started screaming. In retrospect he probably should have let it go. This was exactly the sort of attention he’d spent the last fifteen years avoiding.
But Alvin had been a good dog. He couldn’t let that one go. Didn’t make much difference at this point. His foot was well into it. Only option now was to see it through to the end.
Still in his apartment, Kaine heard footsteps coming down the hall toward his place. He shrugged out of his trench coat leaving him in jeans, a black Troika Death t-shirt, and sensible brown work shoes. He had a good build for a man of sixty, thanks in no small part to the 70% of his body that had been replaced with chrome. Not the slick “looks like real skin!” crap Runners were getting these days. It was hardcore; polished steel, exposed pistons, buff it with Turtle Wax chrome. Not even the retro-rustic crap the gangers were getting into recently could compare.
Kaine flexed feeling the rotors in his joints whirr, and he called up a status report via the HUD in his cybereyes. Everything was either yellow or green, meaning it would work well enough for what he was about to do. It felt good to fire up the old systems again. Real good.
Kaine dove out the door, rolling into the hall and coming up next to the stairs. Two gangers, both armed with old model HKs, skittered to a stop as he appeared. Before they could activate their wires, Kaine had the Predator up and firing. The first ganger dropped before he could figure out what the hell was happening. The one behind him only managed to get a single shot off before the unexpected arrival of a chunk of hot lead in his skull interrupted his concentration.
Kaine ducked in time to avoid the ganger’s bullets, but they hit the banister beside him, peppering him with a hail of splinters. By the time he got to his feet, two more gangers had hit the hallway.
“What the hell?” the first one gasped. “This fucker is chromed.”
Kaine sprinted towards them.
Or he would have, if his right knee hadn’t gone redline. The whole mechanism locked up, his HUD squealing an alarm, and Kaine took two stumbling steps forward. Reaching out with his free hand, he grabbed one of the banister’s pillars just in time to keep from falling.
In a stroke of the same good luck that had kept him alive all those years back in Seattle, the boys at the door didn’t have guns. Of course, in a stroke of the same bad luck that had forced him into hiding in the first place, they were carrying something just as bad.
Monofilament swords.
He hesitated for half a second, wondering again just what the hell he was doing. He might as well put up a flag out front with his face on it. The smart thing to do would be to get out now, before things got any worse.
But damn it, Alvin had been a good dog.
As his system tried to reboot his left knee, Kaine brought up his pistol. A single shot took the first ganger down, but he knew the second would be on top of him before he could fire again. Instead, he pivoted to the side just as the ganger got close. As the ganger passed, the mono-molecular edge of the blade cut harmlessly through the air instead of slicing his arm off.
Kaine gave his wires another kick, even though he knew full well that’s probably what screwed up his knee, and brought the Predator around. The ganger recovered at the same moment, and he swung his blade at Kaine. Before Kaine could get the shot off the ganger’s blade sliced through the end of the Predator’s barrel.
“Shit,” Kaine growled, tossing the now worthless chunk of metal away.
The ganger, shocked by his own success, didn’t react quickly enough. It gave Kaine the time he needed. Willing the chrome in his left arm up to full power he ripped the pillar loose from the stairs with a crack. Pivoting on his locked knee, he brought it around and jammed the jagged end of it straight into the ganger’s face. The ganger dropped his blade and stumbled backward, hands clasped to his bleeding face. Kaine limped after him, and with a swift blow to the ganger’s neck dropped him to the floor, lifeless.
From outside, Kaine heard shouts and cheers.
He limped down the hall to the building entrance, his damn knee still not turning over. With tires squealing, the last two gangers peeled off down the street in their GAZ-P, crap tumbling out of the back as it skidded around the corner and disappeared. Kaine’s neighbors rushed to him, clapping him on the back, and shouting their thanks.
Kaine grimaced.
• • •
Everyone gathered in the empty apartment at 4D. Kaine had finally gotten his knee to reboot, but it was still running on the edge of red. He sat on an empty crate, listening to the crowd of people arguing over what to do.
“We don’t need to do anything,” the young man from 4C insisted. “Those guys won’t come back here.”
A number of people nodded, making noises of agreement.
“I don’t know,” an older woman from the apartment above Kaine’s replied. “I think the best thing we can do is move on. Find somewhere else.”
A few folks mumbled their assent, but others began arguing against this. Kaine could see the argument that had been going round and round for the last twenty minutes was building up steam again. He couldn’t take much more of it.
“She’s right,” he shouted, his hard, gravelly voice cutting through the noise. The crowd went silent.
“Didn’t you see the markings on those kids?” he asked. “They’re New Chamber Boys, the biggest, best-armed gang on the west side of the wall. You think those boys are just going to run home, and that’ll be that? Hell, no. They’re going to go back to whatever shithole they crawled out of, they’re going to get a whole bunch of their friends, a lot more guns, and they’re going to come back here to teach everyone a lesson.”
A low murmur ran through the crowd.
“This is all your fault,” a middle aged guy in a shirt and tie growled at Kaine.
“You’re right,” Kaine said. “This is my fault. I should have let it go, but I didn’t. For that, I’m sorry. The only smart thing to do is get out of here.”
“Sorry?”
The voice was soft, wavering. It cracked a bit at the end of the word, and Kaine knew it was Madam Hilda. The ancient ork woman, draped in the multi-colored crocheted shawl she always wore, shuffled forward. The people around her stepped out of the way, and as she passed, the gnarled stick she used for a cane rapped the floor with surprising strength.
“You’re sorry that you refused to be degraded by those beasts? You’re sorry that you did what more of us should do? Or perhaps you’re sorry that you didn’t kill them
all, the only apology I’d be willing to accept, I might add?”
She limped right over to Kaine and glared at him.
“Look, lady. I hear you. I really do, but let’s be serious. If these folks stay here, they’re gonna get slaughtered.”
“No way,” the young man from 4C said. “I’m done being the whipping boy for every damn slot in this city. I’m gonna stay and fight. I’ve got a gun.”
“Same here,” rumbled the big truck driver from 5E. “I’m sick of bein’ some gang’s bitch. I ain’t movin’.”
More people spoke up, and a murmur of agreement ran through the crowd.
Kaine looked around and gave a hard laugh.
“You people are crazy. That’s not how the world works. It beats you up, and if you manage to live through it, you get up and start again. Keep your head down and your mouth shut, and you just might make it. I already apologized for screwing this up, and that’s all I’ve got to offer. Go have your little war if you want, but count me out.”
As Kaine left he heard someone say “We don’t need him” and the group began making plans for their defense.
Out in the hall, Kaine stopped. He heard the voice of the old, wheelchair-bound guy from 7D offering his shotgun. He heard the pretty welfare mom with five kids mention a year in the UCAS Army Reserve. He heard the skinny kid from the top floor offer to hack the building and help coordinate.
Kaine frowned. If they went through with it, those people were dead. They were brave, and their hearts were in the right place, but they weren’t killers. Not one of them knew, except maybe the Army Reserve lady, what it really meant to kill. Worse, he doubted many of them knew what it meant to watch the guy next to you die.
It’d be a bloodbath, the gang would tear them apart, and tomorrow he’d read a two-line story about it, six pages down in the Detroit Free Press police blotter.
Kaine leaned against the wall, taking some of the weight off his bad knee. He wondered if the old lady was right. He’d spent the last fifteen years “playing it safe,” and what had it got him? A long string of crappy squats in the worst neighborhoods the UCAS had to offer, a list of dead friends as long as his arm, and the pleasure of having his dog shot by a bunch of snot-nosed brats from the ass end of Detroit.