The Sapphire Shadow

by James Wake

  For the first time in a long time, Jackson actually missed her police goggles. It wasn’t great weather for flying. A heads-up display would’ve been helpful.

  She kept close behind Ortega’s bike, coasting high above the traffic. They passed over the old seawalls with nothing but a quick pinging on her bike’s dash display, waving them off with city police permissions. If anyone had looked too close, they might have thought it was strange to see two plainclothes officers riding clearly marked police bikes.

  But no one looked. Beneath her, a seemingly endless stream of cars and trucks poured down dozens of lanes. Off to either side of the raised road, the slums stretched on. Dark, leaning buildings with dim, huddled lights. Millions of people, eking out savage, brutal lives, crammed into land no bigger than the downtown she’d just left.

  Chuck Carroll was out there somewhere, if he was still alive. Jackson had never located him. She herself had no contacts left outside, no family. The Georgian ghetto wasn’t the Georgian ghetto anymore but a walled-in enclave of Bengali-speaking refugees. Everything she had known was gone. The dark alleyways she had prowled through with a gang of other kids while her mother worked long hours to scrape them by. The neighborhood watch posts manned by bedraggled volunteers, protecting their faux-Southern turf. Even the old strip mall parking lot that served as the neighborhood commons, torn down and built over.

  No point going back.

  She’d tried to find him, but she never even found out where he’d been booked, found no record of his name in any criminal database to which she had access.

  “You’ve seen it before, right?” Ortega’s voice said in her ears.

  “Not up close,” she said. He wasn’t talking about the slums. They’d talked about the slums before.

  Dead ahead was a bright oasis in the black night. The Omniplant rose out of the slums, its towers level with the highway. Not rose, not really—brought from outside, an occupation. Stretching on and on, with its ugly squat towers, each with an endless procession of autonomous delivery flights landing and unloading and loading and taking off through the rain.

  She’d heard it kept going down, digging deep underground. Only the tip of the iceberg, she’d been told, although she didn’t quite understand what that meant.

  “Thought you grew up nearby?”

  “I did,” Jackson said. “Could always see the fence and the lights in the distance. Just like the city walls. That’s all.”

  The line of the fence below was a stark divide. Confused, decaying slums on one side. On the other, neat, orderly grids of access roads with elevated trams; constant movement without a soul to be seen.

  They looped wide around the complex, passing by the dead zone outside the fence. A stretch of bulldozed open ground, automated gun turrets glaring down from each post. Ortega led them to the roof of an apartment building about a block away, where he landed with a graceless clunk.

  Jackson touched down much more carefully, easing her bike into a soft landing. Instinct dragged her eyes in a quick patrol of the rooftop. They were alone. Ortega had already dismounted and was throwing a dark tarp over his bike.

  “This isn’t safe,” Jackson said. “Parking here, I mean.”

  “I have a guy downstairs,” he told her, throwing an identical tarp over her bike. “Suit up.”

  He’d given her an armored vest, hidden now under her jacket. She pulled out the bag he’d tossed onto the floor at her apartment—fifteen hours left, the clock ticking, although she was half sure she’d never see the place again.

  She held the bag in her hands, staring. The last time she’d suited up out in the slums felt like a long time ago. Gas mask on, helmet over that, shield up and ready. Charging out into people fleeing for their lives, gunshots raging all around her. Her boots crushing homemade signs under foot, scratchy pleas reading, PLEASE HELP US and WE NEED FOOD.

  That was years ago. Jackson shook her head, trying to forget, to push it back down.

  The bag tore open like flimsy tissue paper. Jackson pulled her hair back and slipped her mask on, in time with Ortega next to her. Blue surgical gloves snapping at her wrists. Finally, a pistol, small and flimsy. Translucent. When she pulled the slide, a pathetic plastic round looked back at her from the chamber.

  “What the hell good is this peashooter supposed to do?”

  Ortega checked an identical gun. “Unregistered. Untraceable. Not like that hand cannon you used to carry.”

  Jackson grumbled a few nasty things but tucked the gun into her belt anyway. She stepped over to the edge of the roof. Staring out at their target, she squinted at the spotlights that blinked in sequence, leading drones in for landing.

  “Jobs for the masses,” Ortega said, joining her at the edge. “What a fucking joke.”

  Jackson stared at the lights. The droning buzz of engines, every hour of every day. Just as she had done years before, she closed her eyes, trying to remember the sound of wind through the branches of an ash tree.

  All she sensed was the smell. That stinging, cloying smell—the haze of chemical fumes that surrounded the Omniplant for miles around, soaking into her clothes and her food and every wall of every run-down apartment she’d lived in.

  “All us slum kids,” she said, eyes still closed. “We used to dare each other to break in.” She gestured to the Omniplant.

  “What? Why?”

  “To steal shit,” she said. “All the rich folks have their rich stuff made there.”

  Ortega shrugged. “I guess that’s not too wrong. Any of you ever do it?”

  “No,” she said, opening her eyes. “Some of them tried. The guns tore them to pieces. And then crows would come to clean up, and the guns would tear them to pieces.”

  Ortega stared down at where the fence was hidden from view by sagging, dark wrecks of buildings. Jackson knew the look in his eyes—although, just like the look she’d seen in her apartment, she’d never seen it on him before. He was terrified.

  “You gonna be alright?” she said.

  He took a deep breath. There were trembles in it, sending drops of rain shaking off his mask. “My kids are never going to see anything like that.”

  That got a raised eyebrow. “Your kids?”

  “Future tense. Hell, if I could afford the licensing, I’d have a pile of the little bastards already.”

  Jackson chuckled. “I already feel sorry for their mother. Future tense.”

  Ortega sighed. “You know, that was when I started listening to Cheshire. I kept telling myself…as soon as my debts are paid off, as soon as things get stable…”

  Jackson said nothing as the heavy rain soaked through her mask.

  “That shit ain’t never happening,” Ortega said. “Not the way things are. What about you?”

  Two raised eyebrows this time. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you having a bunch of puppy pit bulls one day?”

  Jackson guffawed. “Not really an option.”

  “Oh, Christ. Sorry, I…” Ortega cringed as he held up his hands. “I thought…you know, those surgeries are pretty good now…”

  “Too expensive. Hell, I’m still paying off the operations I got.”

  Ortega stared at his boots.

  “Plenty of kids out there that need a mom,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “We doing this or what?”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking another deep breath, steeling himself. “Let’s go, partner.”

  Chapter Nineteen: Re-shoring

  Minding the car.

  Nadia scowled. Minding the car. Here she was, in a cramped, narrow pipe, climbing mere feet above a thick, listless river of noxious waste. And where were her companions?

  Minding the car.

  “Should be up ahead,” Tess said in her ears.

  “Yes, very helpful,” Nadia said, staring at the grate in plain view ahead of her. Tess said nothing, which was most disappointing. Was sh
e not watching the feed?

  She crept along the top of a corroded pipe, the inside pitted and stained. Her hands and feet stuck easily. Thankfully. The sludge running beneath her made her eyes water, even with the respirator strapped to the front of her mask. A great pond of the stuff had been her welcome to the Omniplant, a steaming pool of acidic runoff, overflowing and leaking into the slums in great rushing streams.

  Nadia had wondered why the Omniplant had been built out here, outside the old floodwalls.

  The grate was as brittle and eaten-away as the pipe. Hanging upside down, she slipped her cutter out of her belt and carefully turned the dial to the “Slice through Metal” setting, just below the “Explode in Your Hand” setting. It slid through the bars with no resistance, leaving a red-hot nub of metal with a loud snick pop each time.

  “Careful. Don’t let the grate fall and make a splash!” Tess squawked in her ears as she made the last cut.

  A piece of grid fell free, teetering then flopping over, making a dive for the industrial waste. Nadia caught it in the same hand as the cutter, easily holding its weight between her thumb and middle finger.

  “Oh, so you’re watching now?” she said, carefully lowering the grate into the waste, wincing as the metal hissed and bubbled. “So kind of you to be concerned.”

  “Look, I know you’re mad,” Tess said.

  Nadia scowled as she crept through the opening in the grate. She was not mad. She was a professional, on a mission. She did not have time to be petty at the moment.

  “We wouldn’t want such a critical asset as myself to be damaged,” Nadia said, “not before you’ve gotten full use out of me.”

  “I never called you an asset!” Tess said. “That was you!”

  The pipe slanted up, dark and narrow. Nadia climbed, still upside down, creeping toward the innards of the Omniplant.

  “You know what’s really fucked up about this?” Tess said.

  “Aside from the betrayal of trust?” Nadia said. “The acts of terrorism? The general deceit of our entire relationship?”

  Tess ignored all this. “I never intended to send you into anything dangerous.”

  Nadia glanced up—or down, really—at the acidic waste mere feet from her body.

  “I mean it!” Tess said. “Don’t forget, infiltrating yourself was your idea! You wanted to do this!”

  Nadia climbed out, finally, into a wide-open vat. Conveyor belts on either side funneled in all manner of scrap waste, while pipes poured in runoff from who knew what, all of it dissolving together before being drained outside.

  She climbed up the side, vaulting onto the floor of a vast space, with identical vats stretching off in either direction. “I suppose you arranged our reuniting after all this time just to get information out of me?” she said, tossing the respirator back in her bag.

  “Well…yeah,” Tess said sheepishly.

  Of course. They hadn’t seen each other in years. All through college. And then very coincidentally they had run into each other and had kept running into each other. Until Nadia had all but demanded they meet for coffee, which had turned into dinner, which had turned into drinks, which then had progressed into a hushed and earnest and far-too-enthusiastic conversation over so many empty glasses about what the hell either of them was really doing with their lives.

  It had been the only real conversation she could remember having in months.

  “I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to be so receptive,” Tess said. “You…you’d really changed, you know?”

  “Will that work?” Nadia said, glaring at a console nearby.

  “What? Oh, sure. Hook me in, please.”

  * * *

  Hunkered down at the edge of no-man’s land. Jackson peeked an eye over the bricks in front of her to see guns and spotlights mounted on the fence.

  Just like old times. Raindrops shone in the spotlights, drawing her eyes away from the bones sticking out of the mud.

  “Look, I know this is supposed to be a destitute cell,” she whispered.

  “Distributed,” Ortega said. He wasn’t even looking.

  “I wouldn’t mind if you told me how we’re supposed to get in.”

  Someone was talking to Ortega, for his ears only. She could tell, even with the mask on; his eyes looked up at nothing.

  “What? Cheshire doesn’t want to talk to me?” she said.

  That got Ortega’s attention. “Uh…he…”

  The cat himself spoke up in her ears. “Officer, it has been some time.”

  “No, it hasn’t,” she said. “That was you at the riot today. Is this even the same guy?”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Whatever. How are we getting past the guns?”

  “Patience.”

  Nothing moved in front of them. Only the soft sound of raindrops on pavement, muting the ever-present wails of drone engines.

  “How the hell do you have a link all the way out here, cat man?” Jackson said.

  “He’s here. Nearby,” Ortega said.

  “What? How? How do you know?”

  “I have it on good authority.”

  “Your partner has a big mouth.”

  One of the fence posts went dark.

  “This is it. Let’s go,” Ortega said.

  “Wait. What…?” Jackson started to say, but her partner was already up out of cover, darting through the one dark patch on the Omniplant’s perimeter. She followed, boots sinking and slipping through the mud.

  A gun turret loomed above them. It didn’t move. They made the fence in seconds, Ortega crouching low at its base where he should have been climbing.

  “That’s braided silksteel. There’s no way…” Jackson said, watching him pull a small tool from his jacket. It came to life with a high-pitched whine, the head of it slicing through the fence links smooth as anything.

  “Huh,” Jackson said, as Ortega cut a square out of the fence. “Nifty tech. Where’d you get that?”

  He kicked the square in, bending it on one uncut side. “Ladies first.”

  Fine by her. Jackson rolled through, out of the mud and onto damp pavement. She came up at a crouch with her gun ready. Nothing moved around them—before her lay a stretch of open ground that led to one of the many identical squat towers nearby.

  Scratch that. Far to Jackson’s right, movement. A small drone patrolling the fence. “Eyes on,” she said, nodding toward it.

  “You have twelve seconds before it sees you.”

  “Doors?” Ortega said, scrambling to his feet on her side of the fence.

  A door slid open on the side of the tower ahead of them, pouring light onto the pavement. Jackson waited for a silhouette, a Dome peering out into the rain, but no one appeared.

  “Move,” Ortega said, clapping her shoulder. Together they dashed toward the light, making it inside with one or two seconds to spare. The door snapped shut behind them, trapping them in a dull corridor; it took a few blinks for Jackson’s eyes to adjust. Bare metal all around, with long colored stripes on the wall leading off down the corridor—red, blue, green, orange…pockmarked every few feet with little barcode spots, markers for drone scanners.

  “Inside,” Ortega said, taking a few careful steps down the hall. A T-junction lay ahead of them.

  “Left.”

  Ortega moved, and Jackson followed, keeping a wary eye behind them. Cold and still in here, bare pathways not really meant for humans. The left led them down an identical hallway, save for a large display on a wall that scrolled through labels for the color codes. Red for waste processing; green for transit sectors two, four, and six; blue for transit sectors one, three, and five…

  The display flickered. Cheshire’s face grinned at them, with SMILE flickering all over the screen. A moment later, it was replaced with a camera view of the two of them in the hallway.

  “Very funny,” Jackson said, picking out t
he tiny dome on the ceiling that was watching them.

  Ortega sliced open a panel next to the display and yanked out a bunch of thick teal network cables.

  “What are you doing?”

  “They’ve gotten really smart about network segregation.” He attached something with a clip to one of the runs. “Layered domains. No single tap can get to all systems.”

  The display flickered through hundreds of map diagrams and camera feeds, all over Cheshire’s grin, which grew wider.

  “Ah, much better. Proceed down this hall.”

  Ortega started to move, not a moment of hesitation.

  “So this is how it goes?” Jackson said. “Cat man says ‘Jump’ and you say ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir’?”

  Ortega stopped for a moment. “He’s the only reason we’re in here,” he rightly pointed out. “You don’t like it, tell him yourself.”

  Jackson sighed, her eyes on the empty hall behind them. “Hey, cat man! Where are we going?”

  A long pause. Ortega moved away but didn’t leave yet.

  “As I said, down this hall.”

  “Asshole,” Jackson growled. “You want me to help, you’d better start—”

  “No, wait.”

  Jackson stopped mid-breath. It was so different—Cheshire’s words were usually slow, playful, unconcerned.

  “Sorry. Back the way you came. Right at the junction.”

  “All those maps, and you’re telling me you can’t read them right?” Jackson thumped the handle of her gun against the display. “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Transit to sector five.”

  Jackson looked at the colored stripes on the wall. Blue. Leading them down the hall, away from where Cheshire had just told them to go.

  “That’s this way,” Jackson said, nodding at the blue stripe.

  “Faster the other way.”

  “We’ll see,” Jackson said, moving to follow the blue stripe.

  “Do not go that way! Heavy security presence.”

  The display lit up with a camera feed—a trio of Domes walking a slow patrol with drones hovering behind them. Jackson’s eyes narrowed. The corridor in the feed looked the same, but the stripes on the wall went red, blue, green…purple.