Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  "The Ancients shall return! Repent your arrogance, oh humanity, and seek their wisdom!" I saw the spittle fly from the woman's lips as she yelled her message out at the passers-by on Harristown's main street. She wore the polychromatic robes of a priestess in the Predecessor Cult, and, from the amplification of her voice, she either had surgically augmented her vocal chords or was wearing some kind of concealed public-address hardware.

  Her acolytes---a pair of heavily-altered males, their muscles augmented with cloned tissue almost to the point of absurdity---stood naked behind her, arms raised toward the sky. They were chanting some kind of mantra, but I couldn't quite make out the words. I didn't particularly care except that they'd interrupted the newsfeed I'd been auditing over my neurolink.

  I brushed past them, only noticing them at all to be sure they didn't notice me. Today it was my job to not be noticed, which was not too hard in Harristown at Night---not anymore. I remember back when I was a kid, back before the war, when Canaan was nothing more than a quiet, religious agrocolony. Back then, you could walk down Penn Avenue and not see one person you didn't know, or any buildings more than two stories tall.

  Now...now it was built up so high you couldn't see the stars, and the population in the city had swollen to nearly a million. It wasn't home anymore; not to me.

  I shook my head. No time for that now. I had a job to do.

  There was a cold rain falling, and I fastened up the front of my jacket to keep it from dripping down my collar. The weather was always bad this time of year, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Canaan has a rotation period of 125 Standard Days, and the temperature differential that slow turn created used to make the Night a hellish period of huge storms and cold, hurricane-force winds. But the Corporate Council changed all that with the reflectors they put in orbit after the war.

  Now the Long Night was a series of little nights, interspersed with twelve-hour periods of unnatural neon "days." It made things run more efficiently at the new iridium mines, and most of the influx of postwar colonists liked it. Of course, it was slowly killing the planet's native ecology, but what did that matter to Corporate executives twenty light-years away? The imported, genetically-engineered flora and fauna were doing fine.

  Stop it! I snarled at myself. You get distracted, you could wind up as extinct as any of those native plants, Mitchell.

  The tiny, prewar sector of Harristown quickly gave way before me, replaced by the boxy multistory Corporate Housing Projects, where the mineworkers and those who preyed on them lived. The prefab structures had started out as shiny and new as any other metal toy, but had gone downhill about an hour after the migrants moved into them. Now they were shitholes, infested with drug dealers and drug users, ViR addicts, Skingangers, rippergangs, and various other manifestations of human refuse. Wise places to avoid if you had a choice, but I'd made mine a few years ago.

  Finally, there was the place I wanted. It looked much like any other project building, but for the Skinners lounging on the front steps, flaunting the bionic streetware that gave the gangs their name. It wasn't bad enough that the sick, soulless bastards actually had their own limbs amputated and sold them to the underground organ banks. No, they financed their little rebellion against organic life by Ripjacking: kidnaping transients and migrants, slicing them into their most valuable pieces and selling them off. It didn't matter that cloning technology had made organ banks obsolete---not everyone could afford to have a replacement limb or organ assembled from cloned tissue. So the market was there and these were the suppliers. None of them carried any obvious weapons, but that meant nothing with all the cybernetics crammed into their bodies.

  I started up the steps but, predictably, one of them rose to block my way. He wasn't particularly big, and I was sure he was an Offworlder---the 1.65 Gravities on Canaan tends to produce big people---but that didn't make him less dangerous. His arms were bare metal bionics, not even concealed with synthskin, and his head was shaven, revealing the input jacks set behind each ear and at the base of his skull. The sockets had become de rigueur for most technical work in the last few decades, but most of the Skingangers used them to feed their addiction to black market Virtual Reality programs, or to illegally penetrate central data systems---or just to look tough.

  "Wrong place, Norm," the Skinner scowled, the ruby oculars of his eye replacements gleaming with menace. Norm...short for Normal Human. It had recently become an insult.

  "I want to see Cutter," I told him quietly. Act too timid and he'll waste my time taunting me. Act too cocky and I'll waste my time killing him.

  "Maybe Cutter not want see, Norm," he cackled in the abbreviated idiom popular with the Skinners.

  "Maybe Cutter want see this." I pulled a credit spike from my sleeve pocket, tossing it at the jackhead.

  Snatching the spike out of the air, he plugged it into the socket behind his right ear. His natural eye widened at the five K in corporate scrip the plastic-encased crystal lattice represented. He slowly pulled the spike out and began tossing it up and down appreciatively in his palm.

  "Dangerous carrying here, Norm," he warned me. "Man get killed."

  I snatched the spike from the air above his hand, and, while he was still blinking in disbelief, I stepped past him up the stairs to the door. He grabbed my right wrist in a bone-crushing, servo-assisted grip, and must have been very surprised when it didn't break. Enough of this. I spun into a back kick that caught him in the solar plexus, throwing him off the stairs a good five meters out into the street. He tumbled head over heels, finally coming to a stop on his back, wheezing.

  The other Skinners gaped at me, the ones equipped with thermal vision scanning me for bionics, but not finding any. I turned and stepped through the door, rubbing at the red marks on my wrist. The inside of the project was no improvement on its exterior. Canaan wasn't a very urban colony, not like Eden or Aphrodite; but this place was at least a century out of date, and it looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it was built. The hallways were littered with trash, splattered with urine and feces, and crowded with jackheads high on Kick---synthetic endorphins---and hooked into ViR streetware that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain. I was as out of place there as I would have been in a Corporate Council board meeting, but no one tried to stop me. I knew where I was going, and that's usually half of not being questioned.

  Down the main hallway, right turn into a narrower side corridor, down a short set of stairs to a heavy, reinforced door. I thumbed the doorbell, and a scanner lowered from the ceiling to look me over. I half-expected a trapdoor to fall open beneath my feet and swallow me up, but instead the heavy portal unlatched with an audible "click," silently swinging open.

  It revealed another short, dark passage which led into a large, dimly-lit room, filled with operating tables, surgical equipment, diagnostic computers and various medical scanners. Standing in the middle of it all was a tall, thin...well, I guess you could still call him human.

  His cranium had been expanded to handle the cloned brain tissue implants, and the superchargers that provided that extra tissue with the needed oxygen protruded from the sides of his neck. One of his eyes was cybernetic, built for microsurgery, and its housing extended to the bionic ear on that side: a flat, metal amplification disc. There was the standard trio of input jacks, plus one on each wrist...and then there were his hands. They were such a combination of flesh and cybernetics that I wasn't sure what was natural and what wasn't. The fingers were unnaturally long and slender, even for an Offworlder, and inlaid cybernerves crisscrossed them, augmenting his sense of touch. The forefingers looked to be removable, probably to mount surgical instruments.

  What the hell kind of a sex life did this guy have?

  "Mr. Mitchell, I presume," he giggled, his voice high-pitched and annoyingly squeaky. "Or should I say, ‘Constable Mitchell?'"

  "Say whatever you like, Cutter," I told him. "As long as you get around to telling me why you called me here."

 
"That was some little show you put on outside," Cutter went on, shuffling from his theatrical center-stage position to a new one in front of a bank of scanners. "As I could not detect any bionics through the thermal scanners out front, I took the liberty of running an MRI on you as you entered the building." He grinned, a truly horrible sight. "Would you like to see it?"

  "I didn't come here to play games. Do you have the information or should I just take my spike and leave?"

  "Oh, we'll conduct our business, Constable," he said, wagging his head. "You'll have your dreary little arrest. But this..." He hit a control and a hologram sprang to life above the machine. "This is truly fascinating."

  The hologram was a full body shot of me, taken as I walked in the entrance corridor---nothing too prepossessing. Short-cut sandy hair and blue-grey eyes on a broad, square-jawed face, panning down to a thick neck and wide upper torso with arms just a bit disproportionately large. Center of gravity was low, with thick legs and a compact build overall at about a meter-seven. A typical Canaanite male, on the outside.

  Then the Magnetic Resonance Imaging melted away the holo's skin, revealing the computer-enhanced muscle, bone and organs within, layer by layer, and the illusion of normality ended.

  "Forget the bone laminates and the muscle augments, and even the subdermal armor," Cutter said with a dismissive wave of his hand, "even though they're all made of something my scanners can't identify except that it's alive. Never mind the fact that all of your vital organs are about half-again as large as they should be, and let's not even mention those extra organs. Even though all of those combined might raise a few eyebrows, I suppose that someone, somehow might bring together the millions of credits and the team of Corporate surgeons and geneticists it would take to install that kind of wetware.

  "No, the really incredible stuff is all in your head." He giggled at the play on words. "Not the sonar system in your ear canals, or the thermal-imaging lens implants behind your corneas, or even the pressure equalization device in your sinus cavity. No, the truly amazing thing is that you have what I can only describe as the most sophisticated implant computer I've ever encountered." He jabbed a metal finger at the noticeable lump wrapped around my brainstem in the holographic display. "We're talking about biological microprocessors with more storage capacity than a human brain, hooked up through a neurolink with an encrypted microwave transceiver that looks like it could bounce a signal off of a satellite."

  He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. "Now, I realize that this planet isn't exactly the scientific hub of the Commonwealth, but I haven't seen anything like this in a decade of street surgery; and I don't think the Office of the Planetary Constabulary has pockets deep enough to foot the bill for something so sophisticated that Military Intelligence has probably never heard of it."

  "Enough of the anatomy lesson," I snapped, my patience wearing thin. "Look, Cutter, we could just as easily have conducted our business through the Net, like we usually do. Why did I have to bring the money here in person?"

  Cutter seemed to consider his words carefully, leaning up against the scanner.

  "Forgive me, Constable," he said, actually seeming contrite, "but sometimes information is more valuable to a man in my position than money. Let's make a new arrangement. You want the location of the weapons transfer, I'll give it to you---names, places, everything." He retrieved a plastic data spike from a pocket in his loose grey shirt and tossed it to me. "Gratis. You may keep your department's precious funds. What I want is...you."

  "Beg pardon?" I squinted at him dubiously.

  "I've heard rumors about you, Constable Mitchell," he said. "Rumors about things you did in the war...about something called 'Omega Group.'"

  I didn't let the surprise show on my face, but it was there, and palpable, and he knew it. It was no secret with the Locals what I'd been during the war, but there weren't too many people alive that knew the Omega codename. If he'd said "the Glory Boys," I might've had to kill him right there.

  I saw amusement in Cutter's natural eye as he gauged my reaction. I wondered just where he'd managed to dig up that name.

  "And?" I said.

  "You probably picture me as some kind of sociopath, a megalomaniac misanthrope who wishes to lose his humanity like those cretins in the outer hall." Yeah, I reflected. That was about the size of it.

  "I know," he continued, "it would be hard for you to imagine such a pitiful creature having normal human attachments, but even one in my particular business finds himself owing debts to others which can't be repaid through a simple transfer of funds. I owe such a debt for a favor done long ago."

  "There's a point to this, right?" I sighed, beginning to get very uncomfortable with the whole situation.

  "An old...acquaintance has returned to call in my debt," Cutter explained. "And I find myself unable to repay it alone. Perhaps it would be easier if she explained it herself." Cutter fell silent for a moment, his eye hazing over, and I guessed he was contacting someone over an implanted communicator.

  It wasn't half a minute before a hidden door opened on a side wall, and a tall, long-legged human female strode through. I noticed three things immediately. The first thing was that she looked pretty damn dangerous. A black, leather flight jacket curled around her like an armored shell, in somber harmony with the grey fatigues and thick spacer's boots; and a heavy pulse pistol rode low on her right hip, counterweighted by a wide-bladed knife strapped to her left thigh. She was about my height, but the long, thin shadow she cast across the room at me seemed to make her more imposing.

  The second was that she was very attractive, a slightly more difficult observation with all of the menacing trappings trying to conceal that fact. They couldn't, but by the attempt they accentuated the raw sexuality that wafted pheremonally from her. Short, dark hair framed a lean, tanned face inset with sparkling green eyes like some jeweled mask in a jungle temple. The athletic curve of her hips flowed into the armor of her jacket in a stark contrast that would have driven a classical sculptor mad.

  The third thing I noticed was that I was married.

  "Constable, this is Kara McIntire," Cutter said by way of introduction. "Captain Kara McIntire, of late a corporate mineral scout."

  "Expecting trouble, Captain?" I nodded at her gunbelt, not illegal here but kind of an unusual wardrobe item to wear to meet a cop.

  "Isn't everybody?" Her eyes pierced me like a neutron beam, her voice hard but smooth.

  "Kara," Cutter said, "has been the object of some unwanted attention recently."

  "I assume we're not talking disgruntled creditors."

  "Five attempts on my life in the past nine months," McIntire informed me tersely. "First one got my partner. Last one got my ship. I managed to get hired on a freighter that brought me here."

  "Why the attention?" I wanted to know. "You stumble onto a field of iridium asteroids?"

  "Nothing so common." She folded her arms, regarding me with a look of general disapproval.

  "So who's after you?" I shrugged. "And just what do you think I can do about it?" I jabbed a thumb at Cutter. "Whatever your friend may have heard about my past, I'm just a small-time colony cop now. Try the Patrol Service...or the Council Security Force, maybe. I've found them to be particularly helpful." I wiped away a bit of sarcasm that had dripped down my chin.

  "Oh, the Security Force has been very helpful all right," she said. "They're the ones who fragged my goddamned ship!"

  Now, cynical as I was about the whole situation, I must admit that took me back a couple steps...and sparked my interest. The CSF had stomped on my toes more than once when it came to enforcing local laws on corporate property, and the thought of doing something that would piss them off appealed to me on an intestinal level.

  "Tell me more," I invited, leaning against a surgical table.

  "The first hitters were street trash---hired guns. They caught my partner by surprise, spread his brains all over a back alley in Hermes." I thought it interesting that the emotion ev
ident in her voice when she told me about losing her ship was decidedly missing when she described the loss of her partner. "They weren't so lucky with me. I reported the whole thing to the local cops, but they wrote it off as a robbery attempt, or some kind of ripjack gang looking for a mark. I wasn't so sure---we were armed, and obviously spacers. Rippers usually try for easier targets. But they were dead, and there wasn't a hell of a lot I could do about it.

  "I moved on to Inferno, to see if I could find myself a new partner, and a pair of local hitters came after me outside my hotel. This time, one of them got snagged still breathing, and, after a little friendly persuasion, he told me there was a price on my head. The word he got through the Net was five hundred K, corporate scrip."

  I gaped at her in disbelief. "Jesus Christ," I blurted. "Who the hell would bankroll that kind of a price on a scout pilot?"

  "Well, that's the real question, isn't it, Constable," she cocked an eyebrow. "There aren't too many agencies or people who could. And all of them are powerful enough to have a pretty long reach. And that," she emphasized, "is what I want with you."

  "I think I get it." I had to smile in spite of myself. "You can trust me because no one would bother to buy me off."

  "Put bluntly," Cutter interjected with the answer, not seeming at all embarrassed over it.

  "So why are you a target?" I asked. "And where does the CSF come in?"

  "I have an idea of why." She scratched the back of her left hand unconsciously. "After I found out about the bounty, I contacted the Security Force. They promised to look into it, told me to go hole up someplace safe in the meantime, and to call and let them know where I was. And the local Investigator, he kept asking me if I had talked to anybody about a particular find my partner and I had made a few months back on the inner frontier."

  "A big mineral deposit?" I guessed.

  "More of an archaeological site. I thought it was a bit odd that he even knew about it...it was something pretty big, something the corporates would have kept quiet at first. But I had no reason to distrust him...then. So I found what I thought was a safe place, and called to let them know. Not thirty hours later, there was an attack on the place, this time by a professional hit team. I managed to get out, and got shot at again on the way to my ship. I got offplanet as fast as I could and contacted the Investigator. He told me that his comline had been tapped, that he would meet me at a place of my choosing and take me to a safehouse. I chose the main spaceport at Eden---nice, safe place, out in public. I berthed my ship, grabbed a rifle and hid in an access tunnel across from the landing bay. And watched a Goddamned CSF assault shuttle blow my ship to scrap right in the fucking spaceport. Must have killed a dozen people."