The woman whispered, dragging Lou away from the cops, “I can’t tell you here.”
Lou pried herself out of the woman’s grip. She thought about her gun. It was probably not a smart idea to draw it while they were so close to the cops. They wouldn’t take action unless their bunker was threatened, but they might object to individuals being gunned down in the street in front of them.
Rubbing at her aching right arm, glaring at the woman, Lou whispered back, “All right. What the hell is all this about? Who are you? How do you know my name?”
The other woman was distressed, on the verge of tears. “I’m trying to save your life! Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t bloody see!”
The woman shook her head, and Lou thought she looked confused.
She drew Lou further away from the cops. “I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s just so important that you’re careful. You must be incredibly careful. I mean, it’s the police, Louise. You know what they’re like. Right? Right? Just promise me you’ll be careful in there.”
“I don’t understand you. Just tell me who you are.” Lou knew she was shouting, as if at someone who couldn’t hear.
The weird lady said, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Louise? I have to know.” She kept going on this vein, to the point of looking hysterical, and made Lou wonder if she shouldn’t slap her. Lou had met some very peculiar people, but nobody like this.
“Just be incredibly careful, Louise! You mustn’t cross them. They’re the police, Louise. Don’t get mixed up with them! You absolutely mustn’t!”
“Good grief!” Lou scowled, pushing the woman away. “I do know about these guys, lady. I do live here, after a fashion,” she said as she turned toward the bunker and strode up to the two guards, ignoring the yelling from behind. “I have business,” she said, her voice cracking, to the space between the two cops, “with the public affairs officer.”
The cop on the left said, “Regarding?” He had a synth-voice like Dog’s.
Lou looked up at the cop. He was mountainous: easily three hundred kilograms or more in his gear. The joints, maintenance-ports and load-points in the ceramocomposite shell were only visible because of chips and gouges in the matt black finish that exposed the dull gray material beneath. She saw a sheen of condensation on the torso units.
She said, “I just need to ask a couple of questions of your public affairs officer, that’s all. Nothing serious.”
The cop said, “Hand over your sidearm for safekeeping, ma’am.”
Lou noticed that it had gone quiet behind her. She was sure that the crazy woman was about to yell at her about the foolishness of handing over her new gun to the cop, but she heard nothing. Lou turned to speak to her, find out what was wrong—
The crazy woman wasn’t there.
Startled, Lou looked up and down the street. Nothing. Wandering refugees, a few other dead people, gimping along together, singing old songs, falling apart. Drifting bits of garbage tumbled past.
No crazy woman.
She had a more immediate concern: handing over her gun. Lou was pretty sure it had been used in a crime. She couldn’t be certain, of course, but the idea made her uneasy about letting the cops have it. Surely, they’d think she’d done whatever had been done with it, wouldn’t they? Did the Stalktown cops even care about solving crimes these days? Everything she’d seen said they only cared about riot control and shaking down refugees for money. So, who could say? She could feel her belly tensing up, and she wondered how much of her strange physiology would show up on cop sensors.
Bloody hell. Maybe the crazy woman was warning me about this. Lou felt an urge to follow that advice. Maybe I should come back later, without the gun.
Except, she wanted to know what happened two nights ago. And being told not to do something only made her want to do it more.
Lou swore.
She gave the cop her gun, feeling certain she was inviting trouble, and he gave her a claim-disk inscribed with the number eight.
The disk, she noticed, was warm in her hand. It felt ominous. For a long cold moment she thought about the sheer quantity of nano-stuff you could layer on a disk like that, how easy it would be to make said stuff transfer onto human skin, dive into the pores, or slip between cells.
“Okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice firm, as she took the disk, knowing the cops were monitoring and recording her voice for signs of stress and other hints of trouble. She pocketed the claim-disk and found herself rubbing her hand hard against her jacket; and she knew that wouldn’t stop nano-stuff, not even a bit. She tried not to visualize molecule-sized gremlins digging through her tissues, into her cells, full of sinister mechanical purpose.
The gate flashed open; she entered. Her stomach was churning and her knees were weak. The gate shut behind her.
“Damn,” she muttered, looking around.
The compound featured one small structure in the center of a vast flat paved area; the cops lived underground. She saw four big circular iris-doors set into the pavement, each big enough for two hovs side by side.
Lou walked along the designated pathway, reading the multilingual signs set into the floor: DO NOT STEP OFF THE PATH. POLICE OFFICERS AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE AGAINST TRESPASSERS.
The small building in the center of the yard was marked “Public Affairs Office”. It was a fortified kiosk containing a distinguished, handsome male disposable dressed in a standard black cop uniform, no armor. He looked like a gung-ho media presenter, and that was his job, to be the acceptable, friendly face of the cops. If bad guys managed to attack, and they took out the Public Affairs Office, a new disposable like this one would be brought up from cold storage. Lou doubted the cops would replace this particular disposable if he failed before the Bastard’s impact next week.
A nearby iris-door hissed open; Lou jumped, startled.
Hidden klaxons began sounding a warning. She looked up and saw a dark cop-hov on final approach, crossing before the sun. Lou was impressed by its menacing silence: there was none of the normal engine stutter. She had heard that the hovs had a stealth mode, running only on floatfield fluctuations and assisted gliding. The hov swooped in and hovered, for a moment, over the round red-lit opening. The hov was a black vatgrown manta shape, studded with small antennae and sensor bulges. The dark mirrored cockpit bubble reflected sun and bleak walls; Lou was a smear of camo somewhere in that reflection. Floatfields shimmered and crackled the air around the smooth aeroshell. She smelled ozone and the field effects of the fluctuations bristled Lou’s blonde hair and itched her arms. Nausea bubbled in her belly.
The vehicle sank, without a sound, into its great pit. They’re showing off, the bastards, Lou thought, sneering.
The door irised closed, sealing it in. The klaxons stopped. Silence returned.
Unsettled, she decided that showing off was sometimes effective.
“Ma’am?” the cop asked, not sounding interested.
Lou wondered, Could my question really get me into huge trouble? She turned around and looked at the closed gates.
“Yes, yes I do have a question. I want to ask about something I saw.”
“Do you wish to provide a statement regarding a crime you witnessed?”
“I don’t know if what I saw was a crime.”
“Provide an incident summary.”
She took a deep breath and managed to avoid coughing. “It was two nights ago, at the StalkPlex. Not sure of the exact time, but it was late.”
“My readings tell me you’re a dead person, probably in Stage Four,” the cop said, looking at her now with cold interest. “What were you doing in the StalkPlex?”
“Nothing much. Soliciting donations.” She winced inside, knowing this was risky.
“You are aware that begging is technically a breach of m
unicipal codes?”
What, you mean like hunting looters and refugees? “Look, I’m already dead, and decaying fast. I’ve got fifteen credits to my name. If you want those, you’re welcome to ‘em. Beyond that, I don’t know what more you can do to me. And besides, the whole planet goes womp next Thursday.”
The cop considered this a moment. “Resume your statement.”
It worked! Lou kept calm and described the events she’d seen in Dog’s memory-feed, as if she’d seen them from inside the StalkPlex.
The disposable cop took all this in. She knew he’d be testing her voice for evidence of lying. She had witnessed the events, through Dog’s memory transfer, and that would help make her story read as truthful. The obvious gap from Dog’s memory feed might be trouble, but the detail about the passenger terminal skybridges was true.
“Did anyone else witness this event?” The cop was staring hard at her now, trying to scrape every bit of evidence from her that he could. The only thing that might give her away was telling a bad lie.
“Not that I know of, sir.”
“Is that all?”
“Actually, there is this other thing. I saw a bunch of cop-hovs fly in, and then there were cops patrolling the whole area, like they were looking for something.”
There was a long blank pause before the cop spoke. “You saw all this, ma’am?”
“Yes, and I want to know what happened to the two guys! Do you know?”
The cop took a moment before answering, “You are suffering from accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus, ma’am?”
She cleared her throat. “That’s right, yes.” She felt fear gathering inside her.
“Our records indicate no incidents such as you describe in the Stalk Base Complex on the night in question. I’m instructed to suggest to you that you may have hallucinated the incident. Such false sensory impressions have been known to occur in people suffering from your condition.”
Lou crossed her arms, frowning, despite her mounting anxiety. “I’m pretty sure I saw this thing.”
“Our records indicate no such incident. We have checked with the Stalk Base Complex Administration and they, too, report nothing similar.”
Well, of course not, she thought, you’re probably all in it together!
Aloud, she said, taking her time with the words, “I should point out that the hallucinations you suggest account for what I saw occur only in Stage Five of my condition. I’m still in Stage Four. Hallucinations don’t happen in Stage Four, at least according to the material I’ve studied. Sir.”
The cop nodded and said, “We are law enforcement officers, ma’am, not medical experts. I am sure your knowledge of your condition is more reliable than ours.”
“Yes, well. Okay. Thanks for your time.”
“We are pleased to serve, ma’am. Good day.”
Lou turned and left, thinking about what the cop had just said. He allowed that she might not have been hallucinating, right? In which case, what she said she saw might have actually happened.
Hmm.
She left, and picked up her gun. Why, she wondered, as she pocketed the weapon, are you guys letting me have the gun back? And the ammunition? What the hell is going on here?
And what about the crazy woman’s prediction? She had been trying to protect Lou, or so she said, yet Lou had not been in obvious danger. Here she was, free to go, and with her gun. Maybe the cops simply didn’t care about law enforcement anymore. After all, what was the point?
Lou hurried away down Third Avenue. She slapped the ammo-pack into its compartment and switched the mode to standby before pocketing it again. It felt hot against her leg.
She stopped on Hendrick Street when she saw a bunch of old newspapers sticking out of a burst garbage bag left on the street. The city was lousy with these bags, left by departing residents for pickup by the city’s sanitation systems. Refugees and a few skinny feral dogs plundered through the stinking bags.
Lou, feeling like a thief, grabbed some newspapers and headed for home, sure she was being watched.
Chapter 6
Lou made it to the top of the Metropol’s fire stairs, her legs and back burning from the climb. She took some minutes, bent over, hands on her knees, trying to breathe. Her skin was wet with sour-smelling fatigue-toxin sweat. She began to think that it might be wise to find somewhere closer to the ground to live. Breathing too hard through her adapted lungs made a ghastly rasping noise in the stairwell. She could hear it echo all the way down to the basement. “I’m not even carrying Dog this time. Damn!”
It was bad enough that, all the way home from the cops, she thought she was being followed. Lou kept sneaking peeks behind her but there was nothing there except ripped garbage bags, paper and food trash blowing across the street in the breeze, their dry stink heavy in the air.
But even climbing these steps, deep inside the hotel, the feeling persisted.
She pushed through the landing door into the penthouse foyer: warm Dry Season afternoon sunlight filtered through a prismatic atrium onto the black marble floor and walls. Reproduction antique objets d’art from Earth, the originals long since stolen, stood on pedestals, cold and dead, out of context. On the wall next to the elevator, a Goya copy painted itself in two minutes flat, continuously. Lou liked to admire the work, though she understood nothing about the subject matter. She loved to watch the nanobots create magic, reproducing the art stroke for stroke. She imagined the artist himself freaking out at the sight of a fiendishly fast ghost reproducing his painstaking work in such blindingly fast time.
Then she heard agonized howling. Startled, fear in her gut, Lou recognized Dog’s voice, his dog-voice. “Bloody hell.” She pushed through the subtly armored double-doors, thinking the worst. “Dog? You okay? Dog?”
Somehow the cops got to him. That was her main thought, running through the suite’s entry lobby, glancing about. She never realized quite how huge the penthouse was. So bloody immense! What am I doing living up here?
She found Dog lying on the floor near the balcony, screaming, his legs twitching, and his eyes rolled back in his head. He was shivering and drooling a little. Lou wondered about rabies — or artificial things much worse.
Lou crouched next to the animal, touching his head, chest, belly, looking for possible trouble. There were no visible signs of injury. Legs looked okay; spine was all right, too. No obvious breaks. “What’s the matter? Can you hear me? What’s happened?”
Dog did not hear. Lou glanced about, looking for some sign of intrusion. The balcony doors had been left open, and they were still open. Swearing in a clenched whisper, she checked quickly through the rest of the suite, and found nothing suspicious.
Dog’s howling was getting to her.
She pulled out her Paper and checked for any veterinary service still operating in the city. It reported that there had been a veterinary surgeon only a few blocks away, but she had gone upStalk three days ago. Lou wanted to hit something, delicate flesh be damned.
Perhaps, she thought, she could contact a vet at geosynch. They might give her a little free advice. It wasn’t very likely. Free advice always cost something and it usually wasn’t worth what you paid for it. Lou also knew that she didn’t look good on phone screens, didn’t look like someone you’d want to help with a problem involving a sick animal with a head full of photonic processors.
It was hard to concentrate over the noise. God, what am I gonna do? she thought, looking around, thinking about what she had on hand. One thing that couldn’t hurt: Lou scooped Dog up — she ignored her scraping hot joint pain — and carried him into the bedroom, laid him on the bed and wrapped him in a blanket. Might suppress the shivering, she hoped, feeling the pull of fear.
Lou had never before owned a pet dog. Her parents didn’t like animals; they were always too busy to look after them. Which was
true enough. If they were too busy for Lou, they were certainly too busy for a helpless dog.
So, what the hell could she do now? Swearing a lot more, fighting the tension of fear in her gut, she caught herself looking at Dog, thinking, perhaps even praying, Don’t let him die.
But in doing this, close to him, she heard a strange sound coming from the synth-box fixed to Dog’s collar. At first, Lou thought it sounded a bit like a recording of the oceans of Earth she had once heard. There was a kind of rhythm to it, she noticed, despite Dog’s moans.
The blanket seemed to help. Dog’s shivering eased, along with the howling. After about an hour, he settled into what looked like a kind of fatigued sleep.
The collar-sounds continued. Now that Dog was no longer wailing, Lou heard one sound she did recognize: a small boy trying to breathe, but choking instead. It helped, knowing it wasn’t Dog literally choking. All the same, she kept checking him, making sure his airway was clear. His heartbeat felt all right, although a bit fast. He twitched alarmingly, too, as though dreaming something very bad.
Lou gasped as she realized what the choking sound might be. “God, that’s Kid.”
The choking went on. It sounded like a child trying to breathe while someone shoved a tube down his throat.
Kid’s still alive. She took a small measure of comfort in that. And he’s transmitting psychically to Dog, the way he did before, trying to attract someone’s attention, to help him.
Maybe, she thought, stroking Dog’s warm flank, Dog’s getting a direct feed of Kid’s pain, of whatever’s being done to him. The thought of it was hard to stomach.
But what could she do about it? What could she do? This was nothing like her previous cases. Lou had never before had to deal with a missing person. Certainly she’d never had a client like Dog. It seemed too unfamiliar and strange. Where to start?
Lou went back to the main room to fetch her Paper. Sitting on the edge of the bed where she could keep an eye on Dog, she checked her mail and tried not to hear that faint but urgent choking. She found she couldn’t simply leave the room, either. Knowing that somewhere the kid was being tortured, it was all she could do not to scream. It was hard to think straight. She had to stay calm; she was a professional, or so she’d always maintained, even if she didn’t have a license.
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