by Roger Levy
Bale tuned the visor down until he could bear the levels, and focused on the paramed who seemed in charge. He was leaning close to the wounded man, muttering calmly.
‘Nonotyou, sir, don’t you worry, you’re going to be fine, what’s your name, I’m Limmy and this is Harket here, can you feel this at all? No? This? Don’t worry. Can you see my hand here? My face? I’m the good-looking one. Yes, that’s better. Stay with us, you’re going to be fine.’
Bale put himself at the edge of the parameds’ field of view, waiting for one of them to switch away from the vic and acknowledge him. Neither did, so he said, ‘Did you see the K?’
Limmy murmured, ‘He’s not a K yet. This one’s still alive.’
‘Whatever you do here, my target’s already a K. You see anything?’
Harket gestured towards the closed end of the alley. ‘That way. Tall, skinny, wearing a brown onepiece, blue surgical gloves like ours. Didn’t see a blade, but –’ he gestured at the victim, ‘– it’s a sharp one, serrated, maybe ten cents long.’
Bale looked at the alley’s end. ‘Over that?’ It was a mess of rubbish, and above the rubbish a wall maybe ten metres high, blade-topped.
‘Not over it,’ Harket muttered, his eyes fully on his work again. ‘Through it.’
Bale looked again, using the visor, and swore. The gap was tiny. He would have missed it. Not concentrating. Hungover. ‘He got through there?’
The screaming had settled into an exhausted, lung-bubbling groan. The paramedics didn’t answer Bale.
He tried again. ‘He’s supposed to be on a zip.’
‘Didn’t see one. Frankly, we were happy to see him go.’
The parameds lost interest in Bale. Bale never understood how they kept so calm. He could see the vic was going to die, and they’d have seen even more of the dying than Bale had. What was the point? Bale knew it just by all the spreading green. But they kept going.
Limmy said, ‘Harket, can you go to the rider and get me some eph and morph. Sir, can you hear me? We’re going to give you something for the pain now.’
Bale wished he could be like the parameds, calm and steady. Razer had said maybe he needed the adrenaline.
Limmy raised his voice a fraction. ‘Harket? We got more saline back there?’
‘Not enough. Ain’t enough in the sea, the speed he’s losing it.’ As Harket came back, Limmy’s blue-gloved hand slipped and a breathtakingly bright green fountain fizzed from the body and slapped Limmy’s visor. Limmy leaned over the vic, putting his weight down, swearing, then jerked up and down like he was riding something. Bale saw this motion was the body convulsing, out of control, the paramed only trying to hold it down. Harket was back with him now, his fist punching something into the arching chest. The body locked momentarily, then fell still.
Harket leant back and quietly said, ‘Limmy?’
Gently and unhurriedly, Limmy put his hand to the man’s neck, his fingers searching for the carotid. Bale found himself touching his own neck, checking the racing pulse there.
Harket said it again. ‘Limmy?’
Limmy murmured something back, but the atmosphere in the alley had changed and what he said didn’t break through Bale’s visor filters. It was too calm. Bale could lipread it, though, the gentle, ‘Shit.’
Bale raised his visor. The alley looked drab and dirty, the blood like blood, the corpse as meaningless as every corpse he’d ever seen. Bale’s skull thudded, the hangover reasserting itself. Limmy looked up at Bale, wiping a muddy smear of blood from his mask. For the first time there was emotion in his voice. Irritation. He said to Bale, ‘So? You going after this K or giving him a chance to ruin our whole day?’
Bale walked to the alley’s end and saw where the junk had been partly pushed aside. The gap was shoulder-wide at best. Metal packaging, plaswrap and bundle-wire mostly blocked it. He stood back, breathing hard, his head thumping solidly.
He pulled the visor back down over his eyes. His map told him he was staring at a refuse access shaft shared between the sleepotel behind him and a go-food stall. That was all it told him.
‘Delta, where does the shaft exit? I don’t seem to have that loaded.’
‘Wait.’
Bale tried to pull the packaging and bundle-wire further aside to expand the opening but the whole mess threatened to topple and close the shaft off entirely. There were threads of blood, bright green, on the wire. The K had cut himself.
Delta came back, talking fast. ‘It’s a sewage access point, Bale. You go down there and you’re off-comm. I can load you a map but it’ll take a minute. It tracks all the way down to Central Recycle, then it pipes out undersea. I’m getting officers to every access point I can, but we can’t cover them all. Can you follow? No one else is near and the K can’t be more than a few minutes ahead of you. Hold it while I load the map.’
‘Forget that. I’m following now. He’s on foot and he’s cut, so there should be a good trail.’ He pulled at the bundle-wire and held it back with a boot, and said, ‘Access is poor. I’ll just get through.’ He started to shrug off the thick jacket. ‘I’ll have to leave my jacket and visor this side. I’ll be out of contact, just carrying my gun. Don’t get me shot by one of us, Delta.’
‘Bale –’
‘That wasn’t a joke.’
‘It wasn’t funny. Listen, Bale, the gun –’
‘I’ll warn him, don’t worry.’
‘No, Bale –’
She started to say something more, but he’d taken the visor off. He had no idea what had got into Delta, but she was tense as hell. Anyway, he’d acknowledged standing orders, and that should be enough, and he’d also justified leaving the visor behind. Whatever happened down there, he wasn’t going to get into trouble by leaving evidence of it. He wasn’t intending to walk any K out of this.
Dropping his jacket over the visor, retaining only his small seeker torch and the gun, he glanced back at the paramedics. At a second thought he retrieved the light-intensifier from his jacket and slid it over his eyes. The bundle-wire sprung clear of his boot.
Standing up from the body and stretching his arms, Limmy looked straight at Bale and said, ‘I wouldn’t have your job.’
Bale’s heart was speeding. He didn’t tell Limmy what he was suddenly thinking, which was that he wouldn’t have any other job but this. Odd thought to have. He’d remember to tell Razer that. It was the sort of weird thing that turned on her smile.
Yeah, he thought. Maybe it was his friendship with Razer that was pissing Delta off.
He still had the hangover, but adrenaline was pumping as he forced back the harsh tangle of wire and pushed through into the abrupt gloom of the down-chamber. He stopped there and turned back to the ragged edge of light to pull the rolls of bundle-wire towards him until they toppled. The gap closed to an impenetrable lattice and the gloom became darkness. He pushed hard until he was satisfied it was meshed securely. No exit for him or the K, and no one to come after them and get in the way.
Limmy’s voice came back at him again. ‘And I hope we don’t get to see you later.’
The down-chamber stank, and Bale almost wished he’d taken the visor, just to be able to nil the stench. He stepped onto the narrow pole platform, held his breath and punched the GO button. Five seconds of smooth drop, half a second’s decel and a muddy slap as the platform hit the floor. Bale stepped off and sent the platform back up.
Moving off, he wished Limmy hadn’t said that last thing. It was too much like the bad luck of wishing good luck. He set the visor to register recent blood, and followed its click-prompts.
The surface underfoot was rough, and the warren stank of vomit and mould, of stale piss and the sea. He broke into a slow trot. He thought he could hear the sea crack and roar distantly. It was like something breathing, something primitive. The air down here sucked and blew at his face, and the rock trembled beneath him. Lookout’s shield only worked overhead, not beneath the city’s foundations. The crash and smell of the
sea scoured the recycling tunnels.
Rats chittered as he walked on, the visor registering the blood left by the killer, clicking at every splash.
His head was still thumping. At the first fork with an exit option, the killer had stopped, judging by the cli-cli-clicking in his ears. ‘What did you do, K?’ Bale murmured to himself. He knelt and touched the blood, then looked towards the exit. ‘No. You didn’t go straight out here. But you did pause. So, you were thinking of it.’ He looked the other way, into darkness. ‘But you didn’t just keep on running, either. Why did you hesitate?’
Bale went on, more slowly. The tunnels twisted, and then they began to narrow until he was ducking through headhigh pipe, rough with seashell clusters and splattered joint weld. Sewage ran at his feet like clotted jelly. Bale tried to keep his feet to the sides, running skewed, but after he’d fallen twice into the caustic waste, he gave that up and ran through the stuff. He didn’t need the clicks any more. The K’s boots had left a trail of shit splashed up the sides of the pipe. It was impossible to miss it.
Why had the K hesitated back there? It didn’t make sense. He was definitely a runner, not a hider. He’d ditched the ziprider somewhere before the alley, when he hadn’t needed to. When the parameds had arrived, he’d panicked, run into the dead end of the waste shafts when most people would have known parameds would throw themselves out of anyone’s way, that they were trained to avoid confrontation.
But Bale’s head was thumping again. He was losing time. Anyway, the K wasn’t a thinker; he killed someone in what he must have thought would be a blind alley. He was just stupidly lucky.
And there he was, the K. Blue gloves, just like the parameds had said.
Bale stopped, puddled sewage splashing at his feet. The grain of Bale’s heightened vision separated the K from the dull grey side of the pipe where he’d tried to flatten himself, and Bale winced at the brightness of the knife he held at his side. Harket had been right about the blade. Even without the visor to identify it, Bale recognised it as a military killing blade. He couldn’t tell whether the K had the training to go with it until the K moved fluidly forward, spinning the knife across his palm. He had the training.
Something was wrong about all this, though. What?
Bale pulled his gun and said, ‘Drop the blade right now. That was your warning.’
The K raised his arm carefully, high and at his side, keeping his line of sight clear, then opened his hand and flicked the knife outward and away from him.
Such a shining blade, Bale thought. He’ll have cleaned it after each kill, but military ceramic turns dark in low light, doesn’t give you away. Which means he’s drawing me to it.
Nevertheless, the knife fell, and Bale instinctively eased up.
No. Something about the drop was as wrong as the knife.
Bale sucked a sharp breath, starting to move. The knife wasn’t spinning. This was a drop-and-catch.
Bale pulled the gun up again as the K launched himself sideways to pick the knife out of the air by its tip, picking and throwing it at Bale in a single liquid move that Bale remembered learning years back. He’d never been this good at it, though.
Bale fell back, feeling warmth on his cheek, and fired the gun, conscious of the slowness in his reaction, knowing it was the hangover. But his aim was good enough, the K not expecting a Pax officer to have had military training. Bale saw the barrel centred perfectly on the K’s chest as he fired.
Only the gun didn’t kick, hadn’t fired, and the K kept moving, rolling to his feet and running away down the pipe, his footsteps echoing. Bale swore, the word thumping down the pipe, knowing immediately but way too late why the gun had failed. That was what Delta had been trying to tell him. The gun wouldn’t let Bale use it. He was still too drunk.
He threw the weapon aside. At least the K was unarmed now. Bale picked the K’s knife up, retuned the visor to register sound, and ran.
The K had hi-lit vision. That would be military, too. Finding the alley hadn’t been a lucky chance. He’d planned it, ditched the ziprider nearby but not too close. Finding someone in the alley had been bad luck, otherwise he’d have disappeared totally. He hadn’t expected anyone to be in the alley. He’d known how Pax worked.
The other thing Bale was sure of was that the K had no gun, or he’d have used it.
The visor clicked away evenly, still registering blood spatter. Bale was behind the K, keeping pace. The K was younger, but Bale was just as fit. And the hangover was fading as he ran.
A few more minutes and it struck Bale that the K still wasn’t going for any of the exits. He was going deeper, heading seaward. Why? He must know Pax would have the exits blocked. Was that it?
No. He wanted Bale. He was going to ambush Bale somewhere up ahead. Bale was the only one who might identify him.
They were deep below Lookout now, far from RECYCLE and entering WASTE. The stench was different, a more heavily acrid ammonia smell with an underscent of the ocean. What couldn’t be recycled was broken down here to be taken far out to sea by the banks of wave pumps. Bale could hear the pumps groaning far ahead. A corroded sign on the pipe wall told him: WARNING. THIRTY MINUTE AIR SAFETY BEYOND THIS POINT. CHECK YOUR SUIT AND START YOUR TIMER NOW!
Bale went on. Ten minutes should be enough. Anyway, if it said thirty, it meant an hour. A stutter from the visor, and Bale slowed before a fork in the pipe. The passage to the left was dark and narrow, a dead-end feed to the main tube. A moment’s silence from the visor, then cli-cli-clik.
Bale knelt to pick up a dead rat by the tail. He felt lightheaded and had to lean against the side for a moment. The K must be just round the corner, crouched in the feed tube, waiting for him. The rat was largely a skinbag of bacterial froth, but there was enough weight left for Bale’s purpose. He took a long, throat-stinging breath and lobbed the corpse across the mouth of the feed tube, bringing up his arm a fraction of a second after the rat thumped and splashed. The K had to straighten awkwardly to come out of the narrow feed tube, but Bale didn’t give him the time. With all the strength he had left, he stiff-armed the K in the throat and watched him drop, and that was it.
Bale put his hands to his knees, exhausted and breathing hard. Another cli-clik made him look up sharply. He stared at the corpse, uncomprehending.
Clik-lik.
The slumped body was dressed in a sewer suit. His gloves and boots were heavy duty, green. Bale hadn’t dropped the K at all. This was a wasteworker. He’d been shoved out of the tube for Bale. Bale had made nothing more than a distraction kill.
‘Nice move,’ the thin man whispered, standing straight, his blue fists flexing. ‘But it takes more than that.’
It was over for Bale. He could see it in the K’s eyes. The man had known it wouldn’t be just Bale down here, that there would be wasteworkers. As he’d been running, he’d been looking for one. Bale had fallen for the oldest trick, and now every move he could make was covered. The K was just waiting for Bale to choose one.
‘Why?’ Bale said, though he didn’t care. He just wanted time.
‘Good question,’ the K said, and lifted his arm. ‘That’s one more thing you’ll never know. Make your last move. At least try to surprise me.’
Bale threw the knife at him. The K ducked easily and followed Bale’s drop and roll like it was a planned exercise. Bale glanced towards where the knife had fallen, but couldn’t see it. Only the visor responded to the direction of his glance beyond the K with a final cli-cli-clik.
The K stood over Bale and said, ‘Is that all? Disappointing,’ and swept into a kill move.
Bale blocked the flat hand with his forearm, feeling his arm crack. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the K’s foot coming for the point of his jaw, to splinter it and drive through, into his skull. Not good enough, he thought dismally, and that was all.
Eight
ALEF
SigEv 8 My last day starts
I’ve probably given the impression that Gehenna was generally
isolated from the rest of the System, but Gehenna did have a routine connection with the Upper Worlds. It had its deletium swamps. Gehenna had its faith to fire its soul, but the sustenance of its body was founded on the value of the deletium that the Lord had sown in our Eden.
Deletium was a radioactive substance used as a nuclear fuel potentiator. It could be synthesised, but the process was neither safe nor cost-effective. In the entire System, deletium was naturally present only on Gehenna. It was unstable in contact with air and dangerous to extract from the swamps, and Gehenna’s strict restrictions over the use of machinery meant that human workers had to be used to harvest it.
This was not a job that anyone willingly volunteered for, but Upper World crimers often chose to work in Gehenna’s deletium swamps, to reduce a fraction of their Upper World sentence. Hard as the killers and thieves and pirates thought they were, they never anticipated the horror of the swamps. Gehenna’s own crimers knew better, preferring the second chance that they believed execution by fire offered.
Work in the swamps was unimaginably dreadful; there was blood-boiling heat and bone-eating radiation, and while the swamp was like thin mud at the surface, it was as thick as molasses at its floor.
Moreover, the swamps could not be approached from their banks, due to the toxic gases that churned above, so the workers were dressed in full-body atmosuits and swung out over the mire on long-arm cranes before being lowered a hundred or more metres to the swamp’s floor.
Once down and footfirm, they were effectively blind. Their only hope of return was the harness connecting them to the winch above.