by A J McKeep
“Don’t worry,” Garrison told the barman. “I’ve finished my drink. It’s okay.”
Chop frowned, “Don’t be upset. Stay. Let me buy you one.”
“No,” the barman raised a hand, “Have one on the house. I saw you have some business to take care of. Please.” He passed another rye to Garrison. “Make yourself comfortable. You can hear more fireside stories from these guys if you want, or they’ll leave you alone.”
Garrison asked him, “What makes you so hospitable?”
The thin man looked genuinely offended. “Please. You’re a visitor, a new face, and some of my regulars may have upset you. All I want is to renew your welcome.”
Garrison smiled. He wouldn’t rule out the idea that the gang had four members and that the barman was one of them. But then, he hadn’t completely given up on the idea of another fight before the day was done.
He clasped each of the four men by the hand and held their upped arms as he gave them a handshake. “We’re good,” he told them. It was a technique he learned in Special Ops training. It gave him a chance to gage the weight and strength of each man while he looked in their eyes. The look in the eye was maybe out of date since the widespread use of visual implants and chem-assists, but he still liked the old ‘window to the soul’ idea.
Garrison took the drink with him to settle into a booth. The pink noise shield activated automatically, but he flipped it off. The sound of him nipping off the stick of rye wasn’t anything he needed to keep private. And he did not want to be approached unexpectedly.
He thought over the message. “Get lost, psycho.” There was something odd about how Murphy said it. And there was something else. Something Garrison was forgetting. Or failing to remember, perhaps. Chop and his buddies had returned to their nest at the dark end of the bar. Chop and co.
That was it. He took out his phone. Played the voicetag again. He didn’t say, ‘get lost,’ he said, ‘get los.’ Los Si Kho. A dangerous and disagreeable former grunt they ran across in a bar. Was it Cousin Marv's or the Bing? Si Kho was a huge, sub Saharan African. He was known as los Si Kho, because of the disparity between his Korean surname and his African appearance. Garrison shook his head at how the dumbest the things that become funny after a few sticks. He listened to the voicetag one more time. Murphy definitely said, ‘los psycho.’ Clever, Garrison thought. If it took me that long to work it out, no snooperbot will catch it. Then, Probably.
He started to think about how he could get in touch with Si Kho. He was never a man who wanted to be found. Running in his mind through all the possible drinkers, grunts, gray market dealers, and anyone else who might be know how to connect with him. He flipped through the contact list on his phone.
The phone hummed and glowed. An incoming call from an unrecognizable contact.
Accept? Decline?
Frowning, he accepted the call.
No holograph appeared. No bouncy 3D icon. A oneline said, “Are we private?”
Garrison snapped his earpiece off the phone and fitted it in his ear. He onelined back. “Yes.”
The man’s voice in his ear was dark, rich and low. It dipped over ‘r’s and it didn’t pronounce the letter ‘n.’
“Garrison? Garrison Caine?”
“Si?”
“Oneline me the location where you are right now.”
“Si, I…”
“No more talk.”
The connection snapped off. Without a contact Garrison didn’t know how to send him the message. Now what? Then it occurred to him he could make a reply to the oneline.
He went to the bar to ask the barman for the location zip. The barman wasn’t there. From the far end of the bar, Hush said, “What do you need?” Garrison puzzled over how that whisper carried so well across the distance and through the MechMetal.
“The address of the bar.”
Benny’s head went to one side and his flat voicetone buzzed, “Expecting company?” Chop held up a hand.
“We’re all friends now.”
Benny’s laugh was the sound of a machine voice. Laughing.
Hush told Garrison the numbers.
“Thanks.”
Hush raised his stick of beer. “Don’t worry about Benny.”
Garrison sent the address as a reply to Si’s message. He nodded to Chop and Benny. Back in the cocoon of the booth, he wished the barman had been there. His stick of rye was almost done. There was a pad on the table. He could call the for a drink. Probably the table would serve it. He decided to wait. Something told him Si wouldn’t be too long.
Less than ten minutes passed before Si crouched under the doorframe and peered warily into the pink and blue neon gloom.
Si Kho
SI KHO WAS SIX feet seven and built like a runner. Broad with long limbs, even his narrow face looked like a weapon. Si’s strong, high cheekbones, a chin like a precision chisel and dark, hooded eyes peered purposefully. From the doorway he scanned the bar as any soldier would check a potentially hostile environment. Through the MechMetal, a moment of quiet stretched under the sound.
Garrison wasn’t sure Si would recognize him. They barely knew each other. But Si’s eyes flickered a recognition. In two steps that he made look easy and slow, he crossed the floor to Garrison’s booth. Garrison rose and offered his hand. Si’s firm handshake was more like an investigation than a greeting. He looked hard into Garrison’s eyes, studying.
“Drink?” Garrison offered. The few times he and Si had been together, Si drank like a Napoleonic hero.
“You don’t have time.” Si sat. Garrison did, too. “You did a bad thing.”
“I know.”
Si looked hard into Garrison’s eyes. “You listen to me. A lot of us hold Murphy in pretty high esteem.”
Garrison frowned. “Me, too. He’s about my oldest and closest friend. What are you saying?”
Si was silent. Looking at him. Watching. Then he said. “That’s the same thing he said about you.”
“What are you not telling me?”
Si’s eyes narrowed. “Your little adventure cost Murphy his hang.”
“What?”
“We’ll be able to get most of his kit out, but he’s had to haul out of that crib. Doesn’t look like he’ll be able to go back.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s safe. We have him in a secure location.”
“That sounds like something the other side would say.”
Si’s head tilted. “We’re on sides now?”
Garrison put his hands on the table, preparing to stand. “Okay, Si. I thought you were coming to help me, but there’s no reason you should. I know that. So…” He rose. Si grabbed his forearm.
“I am here to help you, Garrison, and that’s what I’m going to do.” His hand tightened on Garrison’s arm. “But don’t misunderstand me. We’re taking a chance and sticking our necks out and we’re doing that for Murphy,” his face moved nearer. Garrison tasted the bitterness of his breath. “It’s not because we give one fuck about your sorry ass.”
“I want to see him.”
“Get him into a deeper swamp of shit? Yeah. I don’t think so.”
“You better switch your phone off, if you didn’t already. If it were mine, I’d put it in a jar full of oil, put the jar into a freezer, and drop the freezer in a lake.” He pulled out a cheap phone and shoved it across the table.
Garrison didn’t move to pick up the phone. Si said, “There’s a oneline from Murphy. I tried to stop him, but he insisted.” When Garrison reached for the phone, Si said, “More important, there’s a oneline from me. Read that first. Read it in the van.”
“What van?”
“The van that’s waiting outside.”
“Where am I going?”
Si blinked and his head cocked to one side, “Where do you think?” His head shook slowly. Universal grunt code for TDTL. Too Dumb To Live.
“You’re going to Great China, asshole. Where do you think?”
As Garrison
stood, pocketing the phone, Si snapped his fingers for a drink while his eyes stayed on Garrison. “And nobody is holding their breath for you to come back.”
Bounceport
THE UNMANNED VAN DROVE him in the rain straight to the international bounceport. Through the rain and the high glass windows of the terminal Garrison saw the bright, shiny surfaces of the well-lit departure area. Well-dressed folk lounged or moved smartly among the usual gaggles of staggerers, struggling with more overstuffed bags than they could physically move without constant rests and rearrangements.
The van didn’t slow at the terminal. It cut through the darkness past wallowing gas-ships and sleek executive catapults. A further ten-minute drive and Garrison saw the military filed ahead.
Large and small combat drones, huge transport gas-ships and the dark hulks of large personnel bouncepods. Attached to the oneline from Si was a pass permit and commission code. It didn’t have space for a name and only a line of checkboxes for campaign credits. About two thirds of those were ticked. Garrison saw that most, although not all, matched his actual field tours and medals.
Lines of uniformed men waited under long, clear plastic shelters with their kit. Some of the lines snaked along and went up into tubes that led onto the fat bouncepods that leaned the catapults. In the darkness the pods looked like huge frogs, splayed out and ready to be flicked into the air. Or grilled, maybe.
Then the tarmac was more or less empty for what seemed like a long way. Eventually Garrison saw men shifting side to side in four straggling snakes. They were not in uniform. There was no plastic shelter above them. Sure enough, the van pulled up alongside one of the lines and the back doors popped open.
The van’s soft voice said, “We have reached your destination.”
Two men stood waiting in the dark and the rain outside. Could have been grunts. Could as easily have been crooks or terrorists. They were big enough and easily ugly enough. Garrison sat back as he took out the phone to look at the oneline from Murphy. He’d had enough rain for one day and he was pretty sure the van couldn’t leave until he got out.
As he pressed the icon to play the message, the van repeated, “We have reached your destination.”
The van would only have the ‘A’ part of ‘AI.’ There was no point talking to it. Vehicle AI was good for greetings and directions and it could produce synthetic interaction with personalized tags like ‘Mister [customer], I sincerely wish you a nice visit in [destination].’ Arguing with it wouldn’t get him anywhere, though. So, he ignored it.
Murphy’s voice on the oneline said, “Man, I don’t know what happened there, but I don’t doubt you had no choice. Sorry about sending Si. He’s no less of an ass now than he ever was, but as asses go, he really isn’t so bad.” A chuckle burbled in Murphy’s voice. “He doesn’t love you too much though. No two ways about that.
“Anyway, man, I hope it goes okay for you in Great China. If anyone can hack that, you can. Make lots of juice.
“I need a favor. I’m thinking I probably will go for the iMortality. It will help Juliet out of a hole.”
Garrison frowned, wondering of there was any way he could trace back the contact to wherever Murphy had gone. If he was going to say, ‘Will you take care of my sister, man?’ they were going to have to talk.
Garrison remembered Juliet from their teenage days. Man, that would be some big ask. She was mean and heavily committed to a slalom of self-destruction. She was the kind of a girl would drag a hold of anyone she could reach. Drag them right along with her.
Murphy’s voice on the oneline went on, “It may not come to it, but if it does, I’ll let you know. And that’s the favor I want to ask you.”
The urge to argue with a oneline was pretty dumb, but it was there all the same.
“We have reached your destination.” Said the van.
A bot the shape of a hydrant rattled up to the open van doors. Garrison paused the oneline. The bot announced, “If you have service documentation, travel authority and mission assignment, present them here.” And a telescopic arm shoved a code reader into the van toward Garrison.
He flipped the phone to locate the documents. The bot said that it was unable to read his coded data. Then repeated its request. Garrison waved and wiped the phone over the reader a few more times until the bot said, “Your bounce is scheduled in twenty-seven minutes. The scheduled bounce has been delayed by one hour and twenty-two minutes. Have a nice mission.” Then it trundled away.
In the rain nearby, the two men with their hands in their pockets shook and made splashes as they stamped their boots. Funny thing was, if they had all been in uniform, Garrison would have invited them into the van. Since they weren’t he had no idea who they were. He could ask them.
H thought about it while he played the rest of the message.
“Man,” Murphy said, “Here’s what I’d like you to do for me. Seriously, no obligation, but I really would appreciate it.” Not after you’ve gone iMortal you won’t, Garrison thought. Your appreciating will be all done by then. “You know as well as I do that the iMortal program claims to upload and store your real neural patterns. ‘The Essence of You,’ is what they say, right?”
Garrison didn’t believe a word of that and he seriously doubted that Murphy did either.
The message went on, “So. When they do the evaluations, the briefings and all the preparation, I’m going to just drop in some information for them. I’ll let them know all about Nero, the big black lab who was my constant childhood companion.” Garrison frowned. “About how we were never apart, we did everything together and he was like my four-legged brother.”
Murphy never had a dog. Never even really liked them as far as I could remember. “That’s how we’ll know.” The oneline said. “You come on by my Enduring Domain. Ask about my dog. You know what I’m saying.”
He did. And it was just like Murphy that he would be cautious not to spell it out over a phone. Just in case some parts of an AI happened to be listening in. He began to write a oneline back.
The van said, “We have reached your destination.”
He ignored it. His oneline said, ‘That place where you got software patches for your enhancements. Somebody I met last night hangs out there. If there’s any way that you can reach her, let her know I’m going to find her.’ He was going to add, ‘I don’t know how,’ but he was interrupted.
Si’s voice came on from the front of the van. “I understand you’re refusing to vacate the van.”
Irritated, Garrison called back, “I haven’t done any refusing. I just haven’t got out yet.”
“But the van tells me that you’ve arrived at the embarcation point, right?”
“You do know that it’s raining here.”
“It’s always raining. I need my van back.”
“It won’t be too much longer.”
“How long?”
“I think the bot said an hour and change.”
“Man…”
“You could have put me in a Cab-U.”
“I wanted to be sure that you went to the bounceport. Directly to the bounceport. Without passing go.”
“Well, I’m here. Now don’t you want to make certain that I stay here until departure?”
“Man, you really are an ass, you know that?”
“Good people say the same about you, man. So we’re good together, right?” then, quickly he said, “You know anything about a place called, ‘Hope’s’? How to find it, for example.” Si made no sound. “It’s a place on the infranet, right?”
After a long pause, Si said, “Sounds like that kind of a place, if you have to be asking about it, then you really shouldn’t be asking about it.” His voice lowered. “You ever come back here, I’m going to bust your ass.”
“You better get working on a couple of extra arms then. Just in case you see that day dawn.”
Rust and Bust
LOOKING OUT OF THE open van doors, the two wet grunts stamped their feet. Occasional glances
in Garrison’s direction made him think of the Corps discipline.
He called out, “Which unit were you?”
Neither man moved nearer but the closest called back, “Rust and bust. Four-oh-four. You?”
Rust and bust. The nickname frontline grunts gave to Mech and Tech divisions. 404, he knew as a ghost squad. Specialized in covert and deniable ops, way into hostile territory.
He called back, “Two-eighty-two.”
“Oh,” the man said, still not moving. “Big boots.”
Garrison beckoned the two men over. When they hesitated, he wished he’d asked them sooner. At the door, when Garrison invited them in, the uglier grunt raised a dripping hand and said, “We’ll make your nice van muddy and wet.”
Garrison shrugged, “Not my van.” And he let the corners of his mouth tug. “And the interior is resilient enough. No soft furnishings will be harmed.” He spread an open hand. Water cascaded off the two men as they climbed in.
The bigger man held out a hand like a boulder. He was the one Garrison judged the uglier, though the contest was close. “Hershey, good buddy,” the man said. “This here is Coke. It’s decent of you. Inviting us in.”
“You’d do the same.”
Coke looked up from under a heavy dripping brow, “You don’t know that.” His smile was easy enough as he held out his hand, though. “Did I hear you asking about Hope’s?”
Garrison nodded. Coke told him, “That’s not something to ask about. Not out loud.” His voice lowered, “But if you were looking on the subnet – you know how to get there?” Garrison frowned. He’d heard of the subnet. Not being much of a techie, he never paid much attention. Coke said, “You get a subnet browser. There’s one called Shades, another is Backchannel. When you get there, if you search on the Dark Road, you’ll find…” he hesitated, “You’ll find all kinds of stuff there.”
Garrison wanted to know more, but asking questions wouldn’t be the way to learn. He could see that much.
A silence cooled the air. Hershey grinned and jerked a thumb at the fat transporter on the catapult outside. “What’s the world coming to when the illegal ops can’t keep to a schedule?”