Kenny’s cage is fifteen foot square of closely-spaced half inch steel bars. No way are they manhandling it out of the room. No one’s about to volunteer to shoot the lock and let Kenny out into the room either, not after what Kirsty told them about Arclights.
“Any ideas on how we do this?” shouts Hemblen, holding the air-powered tranq gun. The noise is beyond deafening. In the room, a ceaseless banging on the bars and chains bolted to all walls rattling as they take the strain. Outside, anti-aircraft cannon opening up with a relentless thudding. Below them, the second floor exploding as the triple-A softens it up for an assault by ground troops already in the building.
“Just keep firing into the cage,” shouts Kirsty. “You’ve got to tag him sooner or later.”
Kenny dodges five shots before the chains stop rattling and start swinging as a painfully thin young man thuds to the floor to lie among the food cartons. His clothes are shredded rags, his knuckles and knees and forehead all torn and scabbed from where he’s bounced off the walls. He lands face-down so Kirsty sees his thrilltat, the half angel, half devil dude design in black and brown ink that Simon had described. He’d been right on that count too. It’s very cool.
They all stare, struggling to grasp the transition between a whirlwind of contained rage and this prone form. Then CrashNet opens up. “Giroux here,” she bellows over the gunfire. “They’re on two already and I’m pulling back from three before they start chopping it up. You better start praying the Feds think we’re worth a few helicopters…”
The BASEracers insist on carrying their guy, strapping Kenny tight to a stretcher for the short trip to the roof. That suits Crash The Pad fine, who take up positions in the stairwells and peer down at dust clouds billowing up from the shredded lower floors.
“You go up top with the BASEracers,” Hemblen tells Kirsty. “Use my crew for cover and we’ll hold them off down here as long as we can.”
She claws her way down smoke-filled, dusty corridors and is so dazzled by the brilliance of daylight that she stumbles and falls onto the flat tarred roof covered thickly with gravel. She shades her eyes and hears the helicopters before she sees them, their rotors beating out a low thrum. She squints against the sunlight and sees black spots against the blue sky as they fly a low formation over the grassy wetlands separating the Citadel from the Toronto Hub proper.
Special Agent White’s in her right ear, telling her to hang on because the lead Black Hawk’s only two minutes away. Elisabeth Giroux’s in her left ear, screaming that Calderon’s down on the fifth floor and her guys are burning through all their ammo and she can only hold for a couple more minutes. It’s going to be tight.
Four of Crash The Pad take twenty paces back from the stairwell entrance and kneel down on the gravel. Kirsty and Judy Alexis and the BASEracers cluster behind their slab-armored frames. Kenny lies strapped to his stretcher behind them. Kirsty’s shoulder to shoulder with some old parachutist with a pistol-grip pump-action. He glances round at Kenny, dead to the world still. He looks back and sees her looking.
“It’d be fitting to finish him right now, you know,” says Bleeker. “To unstrap him and pitch him off the building. One last drop. Freedom.”
“He’s my evidence now,” says Kirsty, unsure whether he means it or if it’s just jangling nerves talking. “Lose him and those choppers turn right around,” she says.
“No guarantee he’d die either,” says Stephan Masse, the famous fallball guy. “Last time I saw this guy, he was bouncing off Scotia Plaza when he shoulda been ’crete meat.”
There’s movement on the stairs, but it’s a mercwarrior sporting medic patches alongside her leaping frog logo. Elisabeth Giroux’s got her arm round a mercwarrior trailing a shattered leg. He falls and screams as soon as they reach the roof and she digs her heels into the roof and drags him aside to clear the field of fire. “They’re coming!” she yells, her voice shrill land wavering. “Coming real soon!”
One minute, Special Agent White tells her. Kirsty looks over at Judy Alexis, resting the barrel of her captured SAW on a mercwarrior’s shoulder. She’s licking her lips and flexing her trigger hand and her eyes never leave that stairwell. “You sure this won’t deafen you?” she asks the soldier.
He taps the side of his helmet. “Got great earplugs in this,” he says, his voice muffled behind the faceshield. “Put out all the fucking fire you can.”
Thirty seconds, says Special Agent White. The rotors are booming through the air now and she can hear the shrill turbine whine of a federal gas-guzzler and the wind’s on her back but she daren’t look round because more wounded mercwar are crawling away from the stairs.
Last out, straight behind, are Hemblen and Cooper, side-by-side and firing down, the returning small arms blowing the corridor around them into a storm of concrete chips and dust.
Kirsty sees it all converging. She’s brought Meat4 Power face to face with the government and neither side can back down now. As Hemblen clears the stairwell and rolls to one side, she looks down the line of guns and draws hers too, pointing the rented Jericho pistol at the stairs. It feels like a popgun but it’s all she’s got.
Then some poor idiot pounds up the stairwell only to come apart in a gushing spray and men and women run through him as they charge and everyone opens up and the noise is enough to crush Kirsty’s skull. The mercwarriors in front shudder to impacting rounds that blow their armor into dust but they keep banging out SLAPs that blast the very walls of the stairwell to rubble. Judy Alexis grits her teeth and shakes as she clings to a weapon she’s barely big enough to control as the soldier she’s resting on takes a penetrating round through the neck and goes down heavily. The whole world’s getting trigger time but there are just too many people charging up those stairs coming and not enough on the roof to stop them.
Kirsty screams and fires as a BASEracer’s head bursts and the soldier in front of her pitches over to one side and she hears nothing but the white noise of tumbling air as rotor blades whump directly overhead. Kirsty drops into a crouch behind the wounded mercwarrior and tries to aim at the flood of enemy but has to raise her hands against red-hot shell cases cascading out of the sky as a storm of firepower tears the air with a chainsaw roar.
She buries her head in the gravel as hot brass burns her neck and, in the end, it’s not M4 troops or Crash The Pad but the eight-barreled cannons of federal gunships that decide who wins and who loses and who lives and who ends up sprawled on their backs looking at that perfect blue sky while their life pulses out of ugly, wet holes punched through their shattered bodies…
Friday 11 April
11:19 am
KENNY DIES A week later, strapped to a box-section steel frame that he twists to destruction despite being sedated into unconsciousness. Kirsty spends the time in an FBI deadroom, constantly asking after him and her friends while swap-shifts debrief her sixteen hours a day.
They don’t beat her and they don’t shout at her. It’s not torture but it’s something mind-numbingly close as she goes over and over the same events, everyone trying to pick holes in her story. She realizes they’re reluctant to act on the President’s famous proclamation that an attack on any part of government is an attack on government itself. She senses their nervousness at unleashing federal wrath on the say-so of a wetvet who scored only fifty nine percent in her last evaluation. So they ask over and over and she answers over and over and when she tires, they keep her interested with news of Kenny.
They tell her how the tube down his throat pumps 20,000 calories every four hours to stops him starving, even though he’s doing nothing more strenuous than twitching and dreaming. She hopes either he’s living his jump off Scotia Plaza or Reboot’s embedded so far into his trashed nervous system, he has no clue of what he’s become.
They tell her when he spasms, doctors hear bones breaking against the restraints, but they knit back together again in a few hours.
They tell her how he’s changing … the lines in his face deepening by
the hour as his long hair grays and fades and falls out in clumps. A billion heartbeats a life, Kenny’s dumb luck to live his stuck on fast-forward.
And then after a week, when the FBI are confident that Kirsty’s story checks out, they forward their report to the White House and release her. She gets out of the disposable paper suit they’d given her and changes into the same torn and dirty uniform she’d gone in with. They walk her to the door of their downtown office and as she stands blinking in the daylight, that’s when they give her their parting shot. Aged 22, Kenny Sossamon just died of old age.
Tim’s there for her, just like he’s always been. He stands slowly, his muscles stiff from long hours spent sitting on cold stone steps. He hugs her and wraps her in his jacket and takes her home. She eats and showers before sleeping for most of the next few days, missing the Washington’s retaliation against Meat4 Power. While Kirsty sleeps, Tim sits guard, his pump action Grandmaster Flash on his lap. He eats cereals from his chipped glaze bowl and watches the fallout live on the newsfeeds.
The cable access shows flash Kirsty’s face up every half an hour, telling and retelling the story of how Meat4 Power attacked a Fed and how an attack on any part of government is an attack on the very country itself. They show laser-guided bombs dropping on high-income Claves, their concrete warheads killing Meat4 Power executives in their beds without harming the neighbors. They show Commanche helicopter gunships blowing armored utivans off the tollroads with fire-and-forget Hellfire-3 missiles. They show journalists going in with Marine units under full air cover to occupy corporation grain processing plants at Irondequoit and Cheektowaga and nationalizing all Meat4 Power pharms in the Columbus Hub as a display of federal power. The country gets the message but the bombing doesn’t stop.
In the struggle to stay alive, M4 executives forget all about launching Reboot on time. The planned date arrives without prime time ads on cable access or promo campaigns in M4 stores. The day’s marked by more killing, more explosions, more acts of arson and political assassination and wanton destruction as an underground army of freelancers tear into what’s left of Bostov Cryo. Leander Bishop’s dirty little war, planned in midnight deadroom sessions, erupts all over the North American Union exactly as planned but instead of the chaos Bishop had envisioned, the country barely notices.
Instead it’s the White House’s rampage that makes it to prime time. President Vandernecker appears time after time to drive the message home. Isn’t it enough, he asks, that the North American Union is beset on all sides by foreign aggression? Don’t the citizens have enough problems already with the worsening shortages? Is he really expected to stand by while the corporate America that takes so much from its citizens now insists on taking more and even fighting the elected government itself? It’s his strongest public admission yet that he’s the President of a nation under siege.
Martha Bhaskar appears before a hastily-convened Grand Jury in Washington. They ask her if she had been Frog One, the controller of M4’s mercwar. They ask her why she’s shredded all paperwork relating to this campaign. They accuse her of planning not one but two separate hits on a federal officer, of unleashing a bioweapon against an Urban Pacification Force and of using millions of dollars of her corporation’s money to destroy a mercwar crew called Crash The Pad. Martha Bhaskar sobs into tissues and shakes her head. She asks the judges how could she understand corporate level security when she’s just an admin assistant? She says she was hired for clerical duties by Leander Bishop, a foreign national living illegally in the NAU who died in the fighting between Meat4 Power and Bostov Cryonics. Martha says she saw nothing and did nothing and knows nothing. She denies everything.
Then people tire of seeing the same message day after day and change channel to the start of the new fallball season and it’s old news when, one month to the day after she’d stood outside Arclights and wondered if she should go in or not, Kirsty’s standing on the painted yellow line at the Citadel gate wondering much the same thing. This time it doesn’t rumble open on rails to let her in. This time a steel shutter opens and a face peers out.
“I want to speak to P Shaun Balaban,” she says and isn’t too surprised that when the gates do open, five mercwar troops and five RESC drag her inside and subject her to a full shakedown – hands on the head, kneel, lie face down with arms out either side.
She tries to be cool as they run detectors over her but the helicopter gunship hovering over the wetlands a mile behind her is making them tense and nervous and heavy-handed. She keeps quiet even though they’re hurting her but when they put a bag over her head and haul her to her feet, she can’t stop blurting out that the chopper’s looking out for her and if she doesn’t come out again, everyone inside the Citadel better get ready for another twenty four hours of extreme hurt.
She recycles hot breath inside the bag as they lead her away and she smells and hears and feels the chaos of the Citadel all around her. Wheels crunch over broken glass and rubble in the road, rotting livedrives ooze out of shattered vehicle shells into sticky puddles. They work hard at disorienting her, transferring her in and out of vehicles, walking her through buildings and driving her away from the other side. she’s no idea where they take her but when the bag is eventually pulled off, she’s standing in a spacious windowless office facing an old, old man with an implausibly young body.
He’s exactly as calm and old and still as he looks in the company promotionals. She’s sweatier than she’d planned but turning up with a sack on her head hadn’t come into her version of events. “I hope you’re not here to gloat,” says P Shaun Balaban, sitting in a mushroom cloud of cigar smoke as he works up a blaze with a hissing butane lighter.
“I thought about it,” says Kirsty, wiping strands of damp hair off her wet face. “But then I stayed up a few nights to watch the B-52s pounding the Citadel and that pretty much worked the whole revenge thing out of my system.”
“I hope you are aware that I had nothing to do with the unfortunate chain of events that led to this.”
“I hope you’re aware that I don’t believe you,” she says.
They stare at each other for a moment then he motions to a chair. “Please sit down, Officer Powell and tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m leaving federal service,” she says. “This is my last assignment.”
Looking at his pulled, pinned, lifted face, it’s hard to tell whether he’s surprised or amused or already tired of her presence. He taps a hardcopy folder on his immaculate walnut desk. “Your file says you have a further eight months of your mandatory federal employment tour to serve.”
She shrugs. “I messed up too much for them to promote me and I’m too much of a fuckup to front their new war on corporate greed. They’re letting me go on a technicality – forty percent hearing loss from a grenade. Federal Environmental say they’ll pay for the implant eventually but right now, it’s the face-saving excuse they need.”
“I see,” he says. “And this final assignment…?”
“…is to tell you about fish.”
“Fish?”
“All kinds of them,” she nods.
“Meat4 Power is a multi-billion corporation built on warm blooded wetware, Officer. I do not care about fish.”
“Oh, you will though,” she says. “Bostov are big on them. Real big.”
“And you know that because...?”
“...I’ve had this Bostov spook called Priest on my back ever since the FBI turned me loose. He called and called and eventually came over to my place to pitch why I should go work for them.”
“Did he make a convincing argument?”
“Not even close,” she says. “But since they think I’m the sort of cold bitch who’d fit right in at Bostov, he let all sorts of stuff slip. Want to hear?”
Balaban definitely looks bored now. “I hardly think you have any intelligence that our RESC have not already gathered.”
“Then you know they’re looking to Europe?”
Balaban puf
fs on his cigar and thinks it through. “Who isn’t?” he says eventually. “It is no secret that the President has been negotiating an end to the trade embargo during both terms of office. As did the President before and the one before her.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but did you know Bostov are fed up of waiting? That they’re going to try and buy their way into Europe by bribing them with fish. Even now, they’re dropping breeding stock into the Atlantic that are bioengineered to get fat on the algal blooms and jellyfish that have wiped everything else out.”
Balaban’s waxy face finally shows a brief glimmer of human emotion. “I recall that Bostov started out in Seattle by reintroducing Pacific Salmon.”
“That was their test run,” says Kirsty. “But since Asia’s the world’s bread-basket these days, the Pacific has no need for American bio-tech. Bostov had the right plan but were in the wrong place. They were never muscling in on your territories, they were just relocating. Their attacks on your gene stores were just opportunistic raids to dip their hands in the cookie jar before they cut and run and hand it all to the Europeans.”
P Shaun Balaban puffs his cigar slowly, hiding his face and his thoughts in smoke. “An interesting story,” he says eventually, “and one that I will certainly pass on. But it does not explain why you are here.”
“It does kinda,” she says. “I asked Priest... this Bostov guy... I asked him why they were even bothering. I mean, why relocate across a whole continent? Why not design fish for the Hub to eat? I asked why they’re turning their backs on a home market of millions and you know what they said?”
He raises an eyebrow. “That there is no future in the home market?”
“Now how did you know I was going to say that?”
He waves his cigar in lazy circles. “Do continue,” he says.
“They give the Hubs thirty more years,” she says. “Not a day more.”
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