Recombination

by Brendan Butts

Plex must have noticed me tensing up because he raised his eyebrows, "What's up?"

  I opened my mouth to respond, and that was when we heard the engine roar of the first Aerodyne.

  Chapter 25

  Growing up in Miami, a horizontally limited domed city, you didn't see much air traffic. Aerodynes were reserved for emergency services and those who could afford permits. Permits cost more than my parents' salaries for a year.

  I'd never ridden in one, though I'd come close when I'd fallen and broken my arm. I'd been trying to spend the entire day with a blindfold on, as a bet with Sasha. This was back before she’d gotten her cyber eyes. So there I was, blindfold on, walking up the stairs to my parents’ apartment. I'd gotten pretty much all the way to the top, or so Sasha was telling me as we were climbing. Apparently, she counted the steps or something.

  I put my hand on the handrail to keep my balance and it had been slick with something. I lost my grip, fell backward, couldn't see in order to grab the railing again to steady myself, and ended up with a broken leg. I was lucky it wasn't worse, or so every adult I spoke with for the next two weeks had told me.

  My mother had wanted to call an ambulance but my father, the voice of reason, had explained to her over and over that they couldn't afford it. Their medical care would cover the ER visit, but the ambulance ride, they would have to pay out of pocket.

  My father had scooped me up in his arms and carried me all the way downstairs. He had wanted to take the elevator, but I'd begged him not too.

  What would have happened if the doctors at the hospital had given me nano-surgeons to fix my leg? Not that we could have afforded them, I knew, but it was still something to think about. My abilities would have manifested, I assumed, but would I have been old enough, would my immune system have been strong enough, to survive the bacteria as I seemed to be surviving it now?

  I shoved these thoughts out of my mind and stared out across the rooftop in the direction of the approaching engine. I could just make out the trio of fliers coming in from the ocean side of the building. I let my enhanced vision take over and reel the sight in. Jet black Holdens.

  I cut Plex a questioning look and he shook his head.

  "Not in this part of town," He replied.

  I pushed myself to my feet and started running for the door. Adrenaline was breaking across my system like waves on a shore and it got me there well before Plex. I flung the door open and motioned for him to hurry.

  We were through the door and racing down the stairs just as the Aerodynes were landing on the roof. Plex had hit the secure button on the door as I pulled it closed.

  "Not going to buy us much time," I said in a rush.

  "Command Center," he replied.

  We took the stairs two or three at a time. When we reached the Command Center, Mez was already immersed in the new data stream.

  "Status," Plex said as we entered. His voice had taken on an authoritative edge that I'd never heard before.

  "They knocked out the Grid just after landing. Our comms are down too. Some kind of jamming. EMP maybe," Mez said, his voice sounding distant. His head was turning back and forth like he was taking in information from multiple sources at once.

  I looked over at the array of camera feeds being shown on the monitors in front of Mez. All three Aerodynes had touched down and were unloading. I counted twelve men. All armed.

  "You said you lost communication with Malak when we were on our way to the roof, could he have been ambushed?"

  Mez gave me a weird look when I said Malak's name, but I wasn't in the mood. Apparently, neither was Plex, he didn't even flinch at the name. This wasn't the time for formalities.

  "It's possible," Plex said.

  "Who the hell are these guys?" Mez said as all three of the security cameras on the roof went to static at the same time.

  "Mercs," I answered.

  "They've got a decker with them," Mez sounded flustered as he spoke. His hands were flying through the air in front of him, almost faster than I could follow. I had no idea what he was doing, but I assumed he was securing the building’s computer systems.

  "We've got to let the other Snakes in the building know we've got company," Plex said.

  "We've got to get some weapons," I countered.

  "Think you can find your way back to the weapons room on your own?" Plex asked.

  I thought about it for a second, mentally retracing the path we had taken through the Snake base.

  "I can do it," I said, once I was satisfied I could remember the way.

  "Good. Get whatever you can carry and meet me in the dormitory. Mez, let's go." Plex said, faster than usual, the tone of authority back in his voice along with something new, panic maybe.

  "What? I've got to stay here and keep locking things down." Mez replied distantly.

  "That's an order. Those mercs are coming in through the roof when they get that door open. This will be their first stop on the way down."

  Mez looked uncertain. I headed for the door.

  As I stepped out, I looked over my shoulder to see Plex dragging the goggles off of a protesting Mez and pulling him to his feet.

  I headed down the stairs as quickly as I could manage. My ribs were stinging a bit with all the jarring motion, but I locked down the pain. Down and down I went. When I hit the 18th floor, I darted out of the stairwell and raced down a long corridor that ran the length of the building. When I reached the other end, I pulled open the door to the weapons room and threw myself in.

  I slid to a halt in front of two Snake members, barely managing to keep my balance. Both were shorter and younger than I was. Both were pointing handguns directly up at my face. The room used to be the living area of an apartment. All of the furniture had been removed and replaced with racks and racks of weapons. Most of the racks had bats and staffs and machetes. Only one had guns. The two boys were standing in front of it.

  "What are you doing here?" the taller of the two asked, "You're supposed to be in your cell."

  "Plex let me out. The tower's under attack. It's the mercs. I'm here to get some weapons."

  The smaller boy started lowering his gun, but the larger one shook his head and the smaller raised the pistol again.

  "How do we know you're telling the truth?"

  I furrowed my brow and cast my thoughts around for some way to prove my story.

  "I was just up in the Command Center with Plex and Mez. Mez looks like he hasn't seen daylight in a month. He was happy the grid was back up and he was installing some new sec ware. Then I was on the roof and I saw the pool with all the graffiti. I've also seen the dormitory and the kitchen. Oh, and your comms are down." I rattled off the words like bullets from a machine gun. Plex would have been proud.

  The two boys looked at each other and I could tell that my words were swaying them a little, but I didn't know if it would be enough.

  "Look, Plex just went to gather everyone up. I'm guessing that includes you. We're all supposed to meet him in the Dormitory. Let me gather up some weapons and we can all go down together."

  "We'll carry the guns. You get the bats," the bigger boy said.

  I started gathering up bats, machetes, and even a katana. The katana was in a back scabbard. I slipped into it and continued picking up weapons. Anything and everything I could carry in my arms or wrap around my waist in a scabbard. The two boys had lowered their weapons now and were pocketing handguns and clips. I noticed the bigger boy was wearing a brand new Du-Wear duster that was exactly my size, but I didn't comment on its origins.

  "I'm Sam and this is Max," the bigger boy said, then pointed at the smaller.

  "Seven," I replied as I carefully pulled a baseball bat with some nails driven through it from it's resting place on a shelf. I turned toward the door, satisfied that I wouldn't be able to maneuver worth a damn if I picked anything else up.

  Sam and Max finished loading their dusters with guns and met me at the door.

  "We've got to hurry," I said, "the mercs might
already be in the building."

  "Go on then," Sam said. "We'll follow you." His gun was back in his hand, though it was pointed at the floor. His face was set, his features grim. Not the kind of sight you ever want to see on a kid his age.

  When did I stop thinking of myself as a kid? He's only a few years younger than me. When those corrupt immigration officers robbed me. That’s when.

  I stepped out of the doorway and headed back down the long hall to the stairway.

  I caught a glimpse of my face as we passed the dirty metal doors of the elevator. Set, grim, and stained with dirt. I almost didn't recognize myself.

  *

  We made it to the dormitory in under two minutes. There had been no sign of the mercs on our way. When we entered, I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun for the second time in ten minutes. It was just as horrifying. I'd managed to clamp down on my memories the first time around. I hadn't let myself think about the gun in Lucas' hand and the bullets it had sent to kill me.

  This time I wasn't so quick and the whole scene started flashing before my eyes. I lost my grip on the weapons in my hands and they clattered to the ground. It was the sound of their impact that allowed me to lock those memories down again.

  Plex was already lowering the gun, having realized it was me. I had no idea where he'd gotten it. Maybe he'd had it on him the whole time. If so, he kept it well hidden. It was a small gun, as guns go.

  "Seburo," he said, recognizing the question on my face, "six millimeters."

  "Is that good?" I asked. My knowledge of guns was very limited.

  "No. It's next to worthless. A step up from a pellet gun, but it's better than nothing. You ever shot a gun before?"

  "No," I said, shaking my head.

  He handed me the Seburo and showed me the safety.

  "Just point it at anything you don't want to be alive no more and pull the trigger. Don't think about it too much or you'll miss."

  I nodded, made sure the safety was on and slipped the small gun into my pocket.

  "It won't get through most armor so aim for the arms, legs, or head," Plex said.

  I nodded again knowing that I wouldn’t be doing much aiming if it came down to it. Then I looked around the room for the first time. It ran the length of the building, several walls having been knocked down. Beds were everywhere. There was no order to them. They were just thrown down wherever. Piles of clothes lay on top of or next to them.

  Still, it didn't look like there were enough beds to sleep more than a hundred and I wondered if the gangers slept in shifts. Then I realized that this had once been an apartment building and many of the gangers had probably taken up individual residence in the unused rooms up and down the building.

  There were five other Snakes aside from Plex waiting for our arrival. The only one I recognized was Mez. He looked paler than ever, his tiny frame just visible behind Plex. The boy had his hand on the back of Plex's shirt and was clutching him as if he was a life preserver.

  The other four were older than Plex. Their faces were all hard and scarred. Three men and a woman. She was the first female Snake I had seen. She didn't look like much of a girl to me. In fact, she probably could have passed for a guy in most circles. Her head was shaved, her clothes were dirty, and her jacket covered up what little chest she might have had.

  Plex took a much bigger gun from Sam and slipped it into his waistband.

  "What’s the deal, Plex? Why are our comms down?"

  "EMP we think," Plex replied.

  "What about the grid phones?" Max asked.

  "I've tried calling a couple of the boyos on their Progias, no answer," Plex said.

  "What are we going to do?" Max said, sounding scared.

  "We're going to do what we always do. Dig in. This is our building and we've defended it from the East India Boys plenty of times. These mercs are no different, except they don't know the layout of the building. The EIBs know it, cause their tower is a twin of ours. This will be easy compared to them." Plex smiled reassuringly at Max.

  Easy. Yeah right. This was going to be a nightmare and Plex knew it. I said nothing, knowing Plex’s words were meant to reassure the younger Snakes present. Anything else would have started a panic.

  "Marching orders, " Plex said, turning to Max and Sam, "Take Mez, get as low into the building as you can without going under water. Find one of the open vents and crawl in. Don't come out for anything. Not for a couple of hours. You'll be safe there."

  Sam started to protest, but Plex cut him a 'don't argue' look and Sam shut up.

  As they left and Plex started giving orders to the other gangers, I turned to look out the window. It was hard to believe all this was happening on such a nice day. It truly was beautiful out. I always pictured bad things like raids and death happening on gloomy days.

  It was a nice day out when you took a bullet to the heart, Sev.

  Yeah, yeah.

  "...We'll catch them in a bottleneck in the fifteenth-floor hallway. The southern stairway is blocked from the 17th down so they won’t be able to flank us. We'll wait for them to come through and open fire. They've got sensor gear for sure, so we can't just hide out and wait for backup. They'll know we're there, but it's our best shot. We need to hold them off for as long as it takes for the rest of the gang to get back here."

  "Is that all? Why don't we just turn the kid over to 'em? He's the one they want," one of the Snakes asked sarcastically. There was a murmuring of assent from the other gangers.

  "If the boss wanted Seven turned over to them, he'd have turned him over. He didn't. You wanna be the one to tell him we let the mercs walk in here and take him without a fight?"

  All four Snakes shook their heads emphatically.

  "We hold, or we die. It's that simple."

  "Let's just hope the EIBs don't pick this moment to attack," the Snake replied.

  A sound from above caught the attention of everyone in the room. It was unmistakably an explosion.

  "That'll be them blowing the door. I guess whatever decker they brought in couldn't cut through the ware on the door. We've got to move. We don't know how long they'll take sweeping the floors and we need to get into position."

  Plex was moving toward the door before he had even finished speaking. I followed him, with the other Snakes close behind. We rushed down the stairs and into the fifteenth-floor hallway.

  "We've only got a few minutes before they get down here. Get in these apartments and bring out anything we can use for cover."

  And we did. Plex and I took the first apartment, and the rest of the Snakes broke into two groups and took others.

  The apartment was made up of two equally sized rooms and a bathroom. The windows, which ran along the length of both rooms from floor to ceiling, held a spectacular view of the Boston cityscape. The first was a living area and kitchen and the second was a bedroom. The door had been unlocked and I took that to mean that this was one of the rooms that was uninhabitable. I was wrong. Where I expected the apartment to be trashed, it was miraculously clean. A couple of jackets were hanging from a coat rack by the door. I almost felt bad as we dumped the contents of a wooden bookshelf onto the floor and pulled it out into the hall.

  We went back in for seconds, and this time we pushed a sofa out into the hallway. I was glad the doors to the apartments seemed wider than the ones back in my parents’ building in Miami. It had taken my dad and me two hours to get a used desk our downstairs neighbor had been throwing out through his door and into the hallway. Then half as much time to get it back into our apartment after carrying it up the stairs.

  On our third trip, we lifted the mattress in the bedroom off its box springs and pulled it out into the hallway. I moved to go back in for another go, but Plex stopped me.

  "Nothing else in there we can use," Plex said.

  I nodded and we began piling the furniture into a wall. I looked over my shoulder to see the other Snakes were doing the same thing further down the hall.

  "Ki
nda feel bad for the guy whose stuff that was," I said.

  "Yeah, think about how I feel. That was my apartment."

  "Ah. Sorry, man." I said with a laugh that seemed to break the tension both of us had been feeling.

  "Don't be. Nice stuff don't mean much if you're not around to enjoy it."

  I held up a hand to stop Plex from saying anything else and motioned to the stairway. At the edge of my hearing, I thought I heard footsteps. Plex turned and motioned for the other Snakes to stop moving. When the hallway was filled with nothing but silence I strained harder than I ever had, pushing my augmented senses as far as I ever had.

  At first, there was nothing. Then, gradually, the sound of booted feet on concrete grew louder. It was hard to judge how far up the stairs the mercs were, given my little experience with my augmented sense of hearing.

  "They're getting close. Maybe one or two floors above," I let go of my concentration and let my hearing return to normal as my own voice boomed loudly in my head.

  "Okay, people," Plex said quietly, "It's go time. Don't shoot unless you know you're going to hit something. We need to conserve our bullets."

  The other Snakes looked back at Plex weakly. They weren't happy with his plan to make a stand here in this hallway surrounded by overturned furniture.

  It wasn't the best plan, but I thought Plex was doing pretty well considering the situation.

  Plex seemed to sense the fear in the other gangers and he straightened and raised his voice a bit.

  "These bakas kidnap the boss' brother. They come into our tower. Invade our turf. Blow up our roof," Plex's voice was deadly as he spoke. " Are we going to let that stand? Are we going to let these splat job weak sauce mercs walk in and take what they want? I say we send them all to the vats. With fire."

  The Snakes roared their assent to Plex's words and he turned away as they began taking up positions. Plex crouched behind the bookcase. We'd positioned the mattress in front of it, in hopes of slowing down, if not stopping, any bullets that came our way. I crouched beside him and pulled the Seburo out of my pocket.

  “Nice speech,” I said.