B-spine

by Cam Winstanley

  There’s only one figure standing in the room now, head-to-toe black and trailing yellow rope that loops around his body and trails across the room to the top of a shattered window frame. Kirsty gapes as he strides across the smoke-filled room to point a pistol behind the couch. She sees a bloody hand reach up imploringly before he fires three times and knocks it right down again.

  Then it’s all over. The curtains burn off their rails and flutter down into the street. The man in black, still trailing rope, pulls the extinguisher off the kitchen wall and jets white clouds over the body burning on the floor. The ringing in Kirsty’s ears subsides as the corpse of countdown man twitches next to her.

  “Are you hurt?” He pulls the gas mask up off his face as he stands over her, tugging at the velcro straps that fasten a short barreled shotgun to his forearm. His neck and forehead are blackened but his face clean. He’s good looking. Short neat hair, intense green eyes, clean shaven.

  “Kirsty, are you hit?” He puts the shotgun on the floor and starts to pat her down, roughly running gloved hands over her body. When she bats them away, he steps back and goes over to where Tim’s lying. He kicks a spraygun away from the smoking corpse as he pulls a butterfly knife to cut Tim’s ties.

  “I’ve got to call this in before PD swamp the area,” he shouts, the words tripping over each other as he hurries them out. “Today’s been a mess, I know that. But I’m going to deal with this. You’re safe now, Kirsty.”

  “Are…” She gulps, working some moisture into her dry mouth. “Are you Bostov?”

  “No, I’m Cusack,” he says, slicing the plastic ties binding Tim. “I work for Carmine Cares. We’re an Urban Pacification Force crew – personal protection, zone security, maybe you’ve heard of us…? Pucker your lips, friend.” He rips the tape off Tim’s mouth and Tim gulps air hungrily.

  He stands and picks up the extinguisher again. “Anyway, Bostov called Carmine… the boss… and me and my guys have been trying to look out for you. So in a roundabout way, to answer your question, I guess I’d have to say yes.”

  But she’s stopped listening already. As he starts squirting the burning microwave with the extinguisher, she crawls over glass and charred wood and brass bullet casings towards where Tim’s flat on his back, gasping. She loops her arms around his head, curls up into a ball next to him and starts crying clean rivers down dirty cheeks.

  Tuesday 11 March

  02:48 am

  FOR THE DURATION of Crash The Pad’s Denver mercwar, Bishop stayed awake. He must have slept, he knew he must, but stashed away in his moldy admin building with bullet proof panels screwed over the exterior windows, day and night quickly became abstracts.

  Days, he oversaw the mercwar, despite his determination not to become involved. Martha surpassed his expectations when it came to planning and coordinating both her team of admins and units of armed and armored merwarrriors but it turned out, was a little too ready to throw soldiers into the firing line. Her initial enthusiasm to stay on schedule resulted in so many casualties that Bishop felt the need to slow Crash The Pad’ rampage through Bostov facilities down to allow further recon and reinforcements.

  Nights, Bishop sat in the deadroom with undesirables. He chewed caffeine tablets while he made a deal with a white supremacist from the Detroit Hub. He had a medic fit an arm shunt and absorbed dextrose and protein through a drop as he met snipers and bomb makers, poisoners and chemical experts. When he lay awake on his fold-out cot during rare moments of down time, it was pharmaceuticals that kept him awake, not his conscience.

  So when Martha shook him awake in the middle of a rare night’s sleep, he was bound to feel angry. He sat up and blinked and his burning eyelids scraped grittily over his reddened, sunken eyes. “This better be really fucking worthwhile,” he rasped.

  “Professor Jeff Chang just called,” she said. “He’s flying over the Hub right now. He says there’s been a major event. He says that Reboot’s secrecy had been compromised… potentially.”

  He coughed and tried to swallow and Martha handed him some bottled water. “What else did he say?”

  “Not much. That civilians were involved. That Reboot was involved too.”

  “That’s it?” He ran his fingers through thinning hair and tried to force thoughts through the fog in his head. “I don’t know what the problem is”

  “You don’t,” said Martha.

  “So I can’t direct a solution from here, can I?” he said.

  “You can’t,” said Martha.

  He rubbed his face. “Fucking hell,” he said. “I’m going to have to go out, aren’t I?”

  Martha nodded again. “I thought you’d say that. I’ve got clean clothes, coffee in a flask and the airship’s overhead and waiting to land on the lawn outside…”

  They flew with two Citadel guards, their rifles flat on their laps, eyes hidden behind twin-tubed image intensifiers as they constantly scanned the darkness. As the airship made altitude over the Citadel, Bishop watched Martha grip her seat and mouth silent prayers. “You’ve never flown before?” he asked but she just shut her eyes and muttered to herself.

  He looked out and saw that the pilot was taking them out over Lake Ontario before looping back to the Hub. This longer route masked their point of departure. Several airships flying over the Citadel link road had been brought down by accurate ground fire. He sat back and scratched, his skin sticky and dirty inside the crisp Meat4 Power security uniform Martha had found for him. She’d been apologetic but it was the only clean clothing she could find at short notice.

  Martha recovered her composure as the airship’s engines throttled back into level flight. She poured him hot coffee and waited as he drank enough to feel alert. “Okay, Martha,” he said eventually. “What are you flying me into?”

  “Professor Chang called en route to a nightclub on the western side of the Hub,” she said. “The pilot says ETA is forty minutes.”

  “What alerted Chang to this so quickly?”

  “Local PD initially called the Citadel to report that an M4P product had inflicted human injuries,” she said. “Clearly the address has some significance to R&D division, because they immediately dispatched Chang.”

  “How secure is the site? What do we know about the area?”

  “The club’s in District 45 which is a secure Meat4 Power friendly District. We’ve got wetware breeding pens and assembly lines all over and local PD defer to us unquestioningly. The area manager, one John Danford, was immediately dispatched to liaise with Chang and emergency services.”

  “How is this being contained? What about witnesses? What about casualties?”

  “PD are imprinting everyone at the club and holding them pending your arrival,” said Martha. “I spoke to Danford briefly while you were dressing and, well, he sounded panicky. I told him to calm down and to offer complete MedAssist to all casualties only if they sign non-disclosure agreements. I hope that wasn’t overstepping my mark?”

  Bishop felt pride for turning a mid-level admin into such a potent force. “Without doubt you overstepped the mark, Martha. Under the circumstances, it was the best thing you could have done.”

  Martha smiled then stood unsteadily and moved up front with the pilot to re-establish comms. Bishop killed the cabin lights to watch the world pass beneath him. Hanging under a helium bubble, pushed along by droning engines, he peered down at the inky blackness of the lake broken only by ship’s navigation lights and the occasional floodlit grids of the floating reprocessors. Meat4 Power owned them of course, complexes the size of city blocks that were subsidized by the federal government to pump day and night, year after year, until the unimaginable volume of the Great Lakes finally started to come back to life. Even this high, he could see swirling currents where giant intakes sucked water through scrub tanks filled with genetically engineered algae and plankton. Even with a dozen floating factories, even with a federal license to power them with nuclear reactors, Bishop would be old or dead before fish returned to
Lake Ontario.

  As the shoreline approached and the familiar pattern of District lighting came into view, he fought the comforting sway of the craft and the steady tone of the engines. Each District was the same as the next – a bright star of light at the central rail terminal fading off to the darkness of the leafy fringes where the rich lived in their Claves. One star pattern next to another, then another, then all the way off to the horizon. His eyes felt heavy, his head lolled. He slept.

  When Martha shook him awake again, he looked out on the same bright pattern and had no idea where he was. He could have been asleep moments or half an hour, he just didn’t know. “Sir, we’re nearly there,” said Martha, back in the seat beside him. “Five more minutes and we’ll be touching down outside Arclights nightclub.”

  Discount King Superstore

  Toronto Hub, District 45

  Saturday 15 March

  07:11 am

  DAN MAKES A play for Suzie’s Twinkie, creeping his fingers towards her brown paper bag stuffed with goodies. Suzie, her head shoved into a half-empty loadbox, has some sort of extra sensory epiphany brought on by too many caffeine-enriched nutriceutical drinks. She spins round and holds her cocked spraygun on him, good and steady. “Back away from the Twinkies,” she says, looking wild and wired and super protective of her snack food.

  Kyle and Suzie and Harmony and Dan are Bostov Cryonics’ Team Lima Three. Current position – outside a utivan that’s parked inside a shipping container that’s one of two metal boxes loaded on an articulated tractor trailer unit painted with the logo of Deerford Agribusiness. The vehicle’s legally registered to Deerford, which is a front company, obviously. It’s a legal delivery vehicle that’s properly parked in the Discount King Superstore’s loading bay. No one will give it a second glance.

  Suzie and Harmony and Kyle are prepping the last four cages before they move them into the utivan where the other four are already stowed. They’re stressing because each cage is snarling and comes with its own sealed loadbox. They’re concentrating hard because each loadbox has a thirty point procedural laminated to its lid and it’s taking an age for them to go through box by box, point by point, in order to weaponize the contents of each cage correctly.

  Since everyone had partied hard last night, the whole operation started an hour late, forcing them to chemically blot out their hangovers and work way too fast. What with all the growling from the cages, tension was high enough even before Dan tried to steal Suzie’s Twinkie.

  On their own time, Team Lima Three are die-hard scagbanders. They find someone’s apartment to sleep in, curtains drawn, headphones on, and wait for night time so they can hit the loudest nightclub they can find. They live for bass beats, rolling their eyes as the fat thrilltats on their backs convert dance music subsonics into chemical intoxication. That’s what they were doing all last night. That’s why they’re late now. They’re getting by on over-the-counter stimulants because although Bostov doesn’t mind how they get their results, it won’t stand for screw-ups.

  Team Lima Three are classic Bostov profiles. Recruited as high school dropouts or aged-out gang members because Bostov promises a work culture that’s better than both. At most, they’ve got eleventh grade schooling but have learned valuable life skills hacking AI-systems or making swift scalpel cuts through livedrive flesh during midnight chop shop raids. To the outside world, they’re a bunch of crazy kids. To Bostov, they’re the ideal team to launch the company’s first Lockdog strike.

  Suzie’s the handler. She’s been up thirty two hours straight. Last night, she was finishing up a regular shift in the pens when some woman she’d never met before showed up, said she was a regulated Security Consultant and told her to prep for an attack. She’d asked if this was for real and she’d said yeah and that was good enough for Suzie, because if this op turns to shit and the Feds grab her, she can’t give anyone up because she knows nothing. She’s working on orders from someone she can’t even name. Maximum deniability, right?

  Last night, she’d walked the full length of the bioweapon pens. Past Litter Nine, the newborns snuggling next to their birthmothers. Past Litter Eight, the post-operative puppies recovering from their chop job in front of heat lamps. All the way to the end to where Litter Seven were snarling and foaming and jumping up at the bars, eager to punch through steel and kill her. Up until two weeks ago it had been where Litter Six had lived but they’d been kept crazy for so long, she’d had to put them in turnaround. Since Litter Seven had eaten the euthanized carcasses of Litter Six, they’ve been Bostov’s top dogs.

  The Lockdogs are survivors by design, battlefield redundancy built into them. Six legs so they can lose a few and still stand – the four they were born with, the extra two back legs donated by less-fortunate siblings and linked to the spine by neural patching. Kevlar sheathing stitched into muscle groups to limit puncture wounds. Lung capacity that exceeds maximum endurance demands by something approaching fifty percent – each can take a shotgun blast to the chest and keep running until it bleeds out.

  Boxed individually in cages so small they can’t turn around, Litter Seven growl at Harmony as she reaches through the bars and concentrates on working without losing fingers to titanium-capped teeth. Harmony’s the armorer, responsible for priming the Lockdogs according to the thirty point procedural on each loadbox lid. Point eight is to snap the minicam and batteries to the hardpoint on the top of each dog’s harness. Points nine, ten and eleven are the three explosive charges that snap to the hardpoints ribcage left, sternum, ribcage right. She can’t be slow or fumble or mess it up because the dogs leave no safety margin.

  “Loadbox eight, point seventeen. Read it off, Kyle.” Harmony works from the ass end, clear of the teeth. She straddles the last cage and looks down at the dog’s cluster of rear legs, a network or bright pink scars standing proud of the short black fur.

  “Point seventeen…” reads Kyle. “Corparilene. What’s ’at?” Kyle’s the driver, keeping busy helping Harmony. He hands her the sterile-packed syringe in a clear plastic bag stenciled with the number seventeen.

  “What’s ’at? What’s ’at? Is that all you say?” Harmony strips the wrapper and spikes muscle. “Corparilene’s a nerve stimulant,” she says. “It fires up the neural patches that graft the extra legs into the spine. It gets those spare legs really pumping. Loadbox eight, point eighteen…”

  Kyle finger-traces the loadbox list, mumbling each syllable at a time. Bostov appreciate the educational limits of their staff – that’s why every item’s numbered. “Eighteen… eph…in…e…phrine. Ephinephrine. What’s ’at?”

  “What’s ’at? It’s adrenaline, two milligrams pure.” Harmony jets the syringe into an implanted IV shunt and the chemical lights up the lockdog’s senses like a pint of napalm. She steps back as the dog starts shaking uncontrollably. “Loadbox eight, point nineteen…”

  “Comms check,” reads Kyle. “What’s ’at?”

  Harmony rolls her eyes. “It’s a comms check, you dumb motherfucker. Once, just once, think what you’re saying. Hey Dan, comms check for dog eight…”

  Dan’s the comms guy, working from the second steel shipping container, sitting on a stack of foam-filled packing case and facing the screen bank he’s already unpacked. He punches up minicam eight and gets a shaking dog’s eye view of a cage. He flips in electronic damping and the image stabilizes.

  “It’s good,” he yells back. “Kyle, get your ugly face in frame.” Kyle bends over and gives the dog the finger as the minicam screen-grabs his face. It measures his eye separation, maximum jaw width, clearance between septum and upper lip. It compares his face to the man recorded the night before by a Bostov surveillance team and rejects Kyle. “No visual match,” says Dan, “we don’t get to trash Kyle. Loadbox eight comms check’s a go, Harmony. They’re all ready. Let’s load the van…”

  Does it bother Suzie that the dogs she raised are heading out to die? Not one bit. Sure they ‘d looked cute as puppies but they’d never bee
n normal dogs. The techs had explained it to her when she’d first joined the Lockdog program. They told her the Lockdogs had been DNA-coded to be vicious – “mean in the genes” was how they’d put it. They told her how their whole olfactory system had been tweaked and primed so now they were capable of only detecting a single smell, but from any distance. “Imagine you could only see yellow,” they’d told her, “but that if anything was yellow, you’d see it. Even if it was small. Even in the dark. Even from miles away. That’s how the Lockdogs smell their lock scent.”

  Loadbox six, point twenty two – gel pack. Suzie takes a half gallon plastic bottle of flame-retardant gel and squeezes it over the animal as it shakes and snarls. Dan and Kyle haul the cages into place then reverses the utivan out of the container and onto the superstore loading bay while Harmony buckles into her ceramic plate body armor. Suzie takes one last look at Litter Seven then swings the back doors shut and primes the explosive bolts drilled into the hinges.

  “Let’s do it then,” she says. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”

  “Woah,” says Kyle. “That sounds pretty fuckin’ cool.”

  “Don’t it just?” says Suzie. “I always wanted to say that. It’s the only bit of Shakespeare I know.”

  “Shake who? Shake what?” says Kyle and Suzie just tuts and bangs the side as Kyle and Harmony drive off. Suzie’s done her part in this. She climbs into the shipping container with Dan’s comms gear and settles back to watch the fun. For two years now, she’s nursed litter after litter of Lockdogs through surgery before torturing them to send them insane. Now she gets to see if it was all worth it.

  “Which one you think will nail him?” asks Dan, tilting each screen to get the best view.

  “Does it matter?” she shrugs. “If one lights him up then we get a result. Don’t matter which.”

  “Dude, just live a little. Three packs of smokes to three of your Twinkies says it’s number one.” He writes his name across the top of screen one with a marker pen.