Schneider followed my gaze. “Sentries?”
I nodded. “Two slug autocannon nests and at least four separate beam weapons that I can see from here. Very tastefully done, too. You’d barely notice them in amongst all that sculpture.”
In a way, it was a good sign.
In the two weeks we’d spent in Landfall so far, I hadn’t seen much sign of the war beyond a slightly higher uniform count on the streets in the evenings and the occasional cyst of a rapid response turret on some of the taller buildings. Most of the time, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening on another planet. But if Joshua Kemp did finally manage to fight his way through to the capital, the Mandrake Corporation at least looked to be ready for him.
Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines central to the Mandrake Corporation’s current research programme. Maximum utility for ALL resources is our ultimate goal.
Mandrake had only acquired the site a decade ago. That they had built with armed insurrection in mind showed strategic thinking way in advance of any of the other corporate players at this particular table. Their corporate logo was a chopped strand of DNA afloat on a background of circuitry, their publicity material was just the right side of shrill in its aggressive, more-for-your-investment-dollar new-kid-on-the-block pitch, and their fortunes had risen sharply with the war.
Good enough.
“Think they’re looking at us now?”
I shrugged. “Always someone looking at you. Fact of life. Question is whether they noticed us.”
Schneider pulled an exasperated face. “Think they noticed us, then?”
“I doubt it. The automated systems won’t be tuned for it. War’s too far off for emergency default settings. These are friendly uniforms, and curfew isn’t till ten. We’re nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” I agreed, turning away. “So let’s go and get noticed.”
We headed back across the bridge.
“You don’t look like artists,” said the promoter as he punched in the last of our encoding sequence. Out of uniform and into nondescript civilian clothing bought that morning, we’d been calibrated the moment we walked in the door and, by the look of it, found lacking.
“We’re security,” I told him pleasantly. “She’s the artist.”
His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.
“Well.” He maximised a traffic display and studied it for a moment. “I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.”
“What, like Lapinee?”
The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.
“Don’t laugh at the majors, friend,” he said easily. “I had even a two per cent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now,” he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired. “Whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty fucking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.”
“Are you this positive with all your clients?” I asked him.
He smiled bleakly. “I’m a realist. You pay me, I’ll shunt it. Got the best anti-screening intrusion software in Landfall to get it there in one piece. Just like the sign says. We Get You Noticed. But don’t expect me to massage your ego too, because that isn’t part of the service. Where you want this squirted, there’s too much going on to be optimistic about your chances.”
At our backs, a pair of windows were open onto the noise of the street three floors below. The air outside had cooled with the onset of evening, but the atmosphere in the promoter’s office still tasted stale. Tanya Wardani shifted impatiently.
“It’s a niche thing,” she rasped. “Can we get on with this.”
“Sure.” The promoter glanced once more at the credit screen and the payment that floated there in hard green digits. “Better fasten your launch belts. This is going to cost you at speed.”
He hit the switch. There was a brief ripple across the display and the purple torpedo vanished. I caught a glimpse of it represented on a series of helix-based transmission visuals, and then it faded, swallowed behind the wall of corporate data security systems and presumably beyond the tracking capacity of the promoter’s much-vaunted software. The green digit counters whirled into frantic, blurred eights.
“Told you,” said the promoter, shaking his head judiciously. “High-line screening systems like that, would have cost them a year’s profits just for the installation. And cutting the high line costs, my friends.”
“Evidently.” I watched our credit decay like an unprotected antimatter core and quelled a sudden desire to remove the promoter’s throat with my bare hands. It wasn’t really the money; we had plenty of that. Six million saft might have been a poor price for a Wu Morrison shuttle, but it was going to be enough for us to live like kings for the duration of our stay in Landfall.
It wasn’t the money.
It was the designer fashion war gear and the drawled theories on what to do with wartime art, the fake seen-it/been-it worldweariness, while on the other side of the equator men and women blew each other apart in the name of minor adjustments to the system that kept Landfall fed.
“That’s it.” The promoter played a brisk drumroll across his console with both hands. “Gone home, near as I can tell. Time for you boys and girls to do the same.”
“Near as you can tell,” said Schneider. “What the fuck is that?”
He got the bleak smile again. “Hey. Read your contract. To the best of our ability, we deliver. And that’s to the best of anyone else’s ability on Sanction IV. You bought state of the art, you didn’t buy any guarantees.”
He ejected our eviscerated credit chip from the machine and tossed it onto the table in front of Tanya Wardani, who pocketed it, deadpan.
“So how long do we wait?” she asked through a yawn.
“What am I, clairvoyant?” The promoter sighed. “Could be quick, like a couple of days, could be a month or more. All depends on the demo, and I didn’t see that. I’m just the mailman. Could be never. Go home, I’ll mail you.”
We left, seen out with the same studied disinterest with which we’d been received and processed. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street and found a terrace café about twenty metres up from the promoter’s garish third-floor display holo. This close to curfew, it was almost deserted. We dumped our bags under a table and ordered short coffees.
“How long?” Wardani asked again.
“Thirty minutes.” I shrugged. “Depends on their AI. Forty-five, the outside.”
I still hadn’t finished my coffee when they came.
The cruiser was an unobtrusive brown utility vehicle, ostensibly bulky and underpowered but to a tutored eye very obviously armoured. It slunk round a corner a hundred metres up the street at ground level and crawled down towards the promoter’s building.
“Here we go,” I murmured, wisps of Khumalo neurachem flickering into life up and down my body. “Stay here, both of you.”
I stood up unhurriedly and drifted across the street, hands in pockets, head cocked at a rubbernecker’s angle. Ahead of me the cruiser floated to a curb hugging halt outside the promoter
’s door and a side hatch hinged up. I watched as five coverall-clad figures climbed out and then vanished into the building with a telltale economy of motion. The hatch folded back down.
I picked up speed fractionally as I made my way among the hurrying last-minute shoppers on the pavement, and my left hand closed around the thing in my pocket.
The cruiser’s windscreen was solid-looking and almost opaque. Behind it, my neurachem-aided vision could just distinguish two figures in the seats and the hint of another body bulking behind them, braced upright to peer out. I glanced sideways at a shop frontage, closing the last of the gap up to the front of the cruiser.
And time.
Less than half a metre, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disc of the termite grenade hard against the windscreen and stepped immediately aside and past.
Crack!
With termite grenades you’ve got to get out of the way quickly. The new ones are designed to deliver all their shrapnel and better than ninety-five per cent of their force to the contact face, but the five per cent that comes out on the opposite side will still make a mess of you if you stand in the way.
The cruiser shuddered from end to end. Contained within the armoured body, the sound of the explosion was reduced to a muffled crump. I ducked in through the door to the promoter’s building and went up the stairs at a run.
At the first floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.
They’d posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren’t expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs—splash of blood and paler tissue in clots across the wall in front of him—made the landing before he’d hit the ground and then erupted around the corner of the promoter’s office door.
The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whisky, burning…
Splinters of vision…
The promoter tries to rise from his seat where two of them have him pinned and tilted back. One arm thrashes free and points in my direction.
“That’s hi—”
The goon nearest the door, turning…
Cut him down. Three-shot burst, left-handed.
Blood splatters the air—I twist, neurachem hyperswift, to avoid it.
The squad leader—recognisable, somehow. Taller, more presence, something, yelling, “What the fu—”
Body shots. Chest and weapon arm, get that firing hand wrecked.
The right-hand Kalashnikov spurts flame and softcore anti-personnel slugs.
Two left, trying to shrug themselves free of the half-pinioned, flailing promoter, to clear weapons that…
Both hands now—head, body, anywhere.
The Kalashnikovs bark like excited dogs.
Bodies jerking, tumbling…
And done.
Silence slammed down in the tiny office. The promoter cowered under the body of one of his slain captors. Somewhere, something sparked and shorted out in the console—damage from one of my slugs that had gone wide or through. I could hear voices out on the landing.
I knelt beside the wreckage of the lead goon’s corpse and set down the smart guns. Beneath my jacket, I tugged the vibroknife from its sheath in the small of my back and activated the motor. With my free hand I pressed down hard on the dead man’s spine and started cutting.
“Ah, fuck, man.” The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. “Fuck, fuck.”
I looked up at him.
“Shut up, this isn’t easy.”
He ducked down again.
After a couple of false starts, the vibroknife took and sliced down through the spinal column a few vertebrae below the point where it met the base of the skull. I steadied the skull against the floor with one knee, then pressed down again and started a new incision. The knife slipped and slithered again on the curve of the bone.
“Shit.”
The voices out on the landing were growing in number and, it seemed, creeping closer. I stopped what I was doing, picked up one of the Kalashnikovs left-handed and fired a brace of shots out of the doorway into the wall opposite. The voices departed in a stampede of feet on stairs.
Back to the knife. I managed to get the point lodged, cut through the bone, and then used the blade to lever the severed section of spine up out of the surrounding flesh and muscle. Messy, but there wasn’t a lot of time. I stuffed the severed bone into a pocket, wiped my hands on a clean portion of the dead man’s tunic and sheathed the knife. Then I picked up the smart guns and went cautiously to the door.
Quiet.
As I was leaving, I glanced back at the promoter. He was staring at me as if I’d just sprouted a reef demon’s fangs.
“Go home,” I told him. “They’ll be back. Near as I can tell.”
I made it down the three flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though I could feel eyes peering from other doors on the landings I passed. Outside, I scanned the street in both directions, stowed the Kalashnikovs and slipped away, past the hot, smouldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty metres in both directions and the frontages on either side of the wreck had all cranked down their security blinds. A crowd was gathering on the other side of the street, but no one seemed to know what exactly to do. The few passers-by who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed. Immaculate.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nobody said much on the way to the hotel.
We did most of it on foot, doubling back through covered ways and malls to blind any satellite eyes the Mandrake Corporation might have access to. Breathless work, weighed down with the carryall bags. Twenty minutes of this found us under the broad eaves of a refrigerated storage facility, where I waved a transport pager at the sky and eventually succeeded in flagging down a cab. We climbed in without leaving the cover of the eaves and sank back into the seats without a word.
“It is my duty to inform you,” the machine told us prissily, “that in seventeen minutes you will be in breach of curfew.”
“Better get us home quick then,” I said and gave it the address.
“Estimated trajectory time nine minutes. Please insert payment.”
I nodded at Schneider, who produced an unused credit chip and fed it to the slot. The cab chittered and we lifted smoothly into a night sky almost devoid of traffic before sliding off westward. I rolled my head sideways on the back of the seat and watched the lights of the city pass beneath us for a while, mentally backtracking to see how well we’d covered ourselves.
When I rolled my head back again, I caught Tanya Wardani staring straight at me. She didn’t look away.
I went back to watching the lights until we started to fall back towards them.
The hotel was well chosen, the cheapest of a row built under a commercial freight overpass and used almost exclusively by prostitutes and wireheads. The desk clerk was sleeved in a cheap Syntheta body whose silicoflesh was showing signs of wear around the knuckles and had a very obvious re-upholstering graft halfway up the right arm. The desk was heavily stained in a number of places and nubbed every ten centimetres along its outer edge with shield generators. In the corners of the dimly-lit lobby, empty-faced women and boys flickered about wanly, like flames almost out.
The desk clerk’s logo-scribbled eyes passed over us like a damp cloth.
“Ten saft an hour, fifty deposit up front. Shower and screen access is another fifty.”
“We want it for the night,” Schneider told him. “Curfew just came down, case you hadn’t noticed.”
The clerk stayed expressionless, but then maybe that was the sleeve. Syntheta have been known to skimp on the smaller facial nerve/muscle interfaces.
“Then that’ll be eighty saft, plus fifty deposit. Shower and screen fifty extra.”
“No discount for long-stay guests?”
His eyes switched to me, and one hand disappeared below the counter. I felt
the neurachem surge, still jumpy after the firefight.
“You want the room or not?”
“We want it,” said Schneider with a warning glance at me. “You got a chip reader?”
“That’s ten per cent extra.” He seemed to search his memory for something. “Handling surcharge.”
“Fine.”
The clerk propped himself to his feet, disappointed, and went to fetch the reader from a room in back.
“Cash,” murmured Wardani. “We should have thought of that.”
Schneider shrugged. “Can’t think of everything. When was the last time you paid for something without a chip?”
She shook her head. I thought back briefly to a time three decades gone and a place light years distant where for a while I’d used tactile currency instead of credit. I’d even got used to the quaint plastified notes with their ornate designs and holographic panels. But that was on Earth, and Earth is a place straight out of a pre-colonial period experia flick. For a while there I’d even thought I was in love and, motivated by love and hate in about equal proportions, I’d done some stupid things. A part of me had died on Earth.
Another planet, another sleeve.
I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.
Thoughts for a brothel lobby. Ye Gods.
The desk clerk came back, read one of Schneider’s chips and banged a scarred plastic key card on the counter.
“Through the back and down the stairs. Fourth level. I’ve activated the shower and screen till curfew break. You want any of it longer, you’ll need to come up and pay again.” The silicoflesh face flexed in what was probably supposed to be a grin. He shouldn’t have bothered. “Rooms are all soundproofed. Do what you like.”
The corridor and steel frame stairwell were, if anything, worse lit than the lobby. In places the illuminum tiles were peeling off the walls and ceiling. Elsewhere they had just gone out. The stair rail was painted luminous but that too was fading, coming off microns at a time with every hand that gripped and slid along the metal.
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