by Damien Boyes
He doesn’t bother with the jumpsuit, just pads to a bag barefoot, with only the modesty band around his groin, grabs a weapon, and takes up position behind the banyan tree.
By now the crowd has thinned and security is arriving through the lobby. The pale duo split their focus. The woman races outside while the male turns his attention to the lobby doors and raises his weapon, and between him and the Polynesian male they make the oncoming reinforcements think twice.
Sirens warble in through the open patio doors. Won’t be long till the lawbots arrive. But still I don’t think more bots will slow these guys down. It’s gonna take the big guns.
“We have to do something,” I whisper. “Give the TAC teams time to get here.”
“That so?” Anika says, her tone making it clear she knows just as well as I do we’re powerless here. Hers skyn may be built for combat, but it’s no match for those next-level jobs, and mine isn’t close. Plus, we’re completely out-gunned. We try anything and they’ll put our lights out before we’ve moved two steps.
And even if we had guns, with the fog in my head, I wouldn’t trust myself to take on an angry drunk let alone three heavily armed arena skyns. We can only sit here and take it like everyone else.
A shrill whistling rises from outside, then more shots and finally three crashing thumps—probably the hot-dropping lawbots shot out of the sky by the female before they could land. A moment later a heavy whirring vibrates the windows and grit kicks through the open doors as two big hovering loaders settle in above the patio.
“Ride’s here!” the woman yells.
“Roger that,” the leader responds, and he backs away from the tree, keeping the rifle raised at the lobby, firing as he goes. He moves back to the platform he got his skyn from, leaps up, and hefts the female version over his shoulder. That’s a fourth skyn they’re getting away with.
As he jumps down and moves back toward the patio doors, the black-suited bodies they rode in on stand in unison and reload their weapons. They must be running an automated control system. Two race past the leader toward the cover of the banyan tree while the other stays with him as he retreats toward the patio.
Just before he leaves he stops and turns in the doorway and raises the gun in his giant free hand and bows, keeping the female on his shoulder the whole time. His lips spread in a wide, pearl-white grin. “Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll see you next time!”
The loaders hovering above the patio have lowered cabled harnesses, and the attackers are strapping themselves in.
They’re getting away.
I’ve got to do something.
I half rise, moving to go after them. The leader is just on the other side of the doors, has his back to us. Maybe I can run fast enough to tackle him before he can get a shot off…but Anika grabs me by the coattails before I get anywhere.
“What are you doing?” she asks, amused disbelief in her eyes.
“Going after them,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “They’ll turn your Cortex to confetti before you get anywhere close.”
I know she’s right, but either way, it’s too late. The male and female are already airborne, and the leader has his stolen female skyn strapped in. A second later he’s ready too and whoops as the loader shoots into the sky. He fires as he rises, disabling the Service drones attempting to follow, then the vibrating quiets and they’re gone.
The black-suited skyns keep their posture for another moment, then collapse, like someone pulled their plugs. It’s over.
Anika stands, brushing herself off, and I rise with her. She looks at me, finishes her drink in a long swallow, and sets the glass down. Security’s flooding in. There are a few more scattered shots as they pump bullets into the invaders’ discarded skyns, just to be sure, but she barely seems to notice, just keeps staring at me.
“What?” I ask, feeling the weight of her eyes on me.
“You were about to run out after them.”
I shrug.
She studies me for another second, then the stone mask of her face softens.
“Crazy fuck,” she says, then laughs once through her nose before turning and striding across the nearly empty room. She ignores the shouted commands from the incoming TAC forces and disappears through the lobby doors.
I take a breath then pour the rest of my drink down my throat. The bubbles burn in my nose. How do I keep getting myself into shit like this? Bad enough I end up in the middle of another shootout, but worse, I’m starting to think there’s something to Dub’s suspicions about Anika.
Either she’s so dead inside that even an armed robbery isn’t enough to get her pulse racing—or she knew it was coming.
She wasn’t surprised. At all. And though it’s much more likely that everything she’s been through has dulled her to the world, what if there’s more to it than that?
I need to tell Dub there’s a chance he’s not imagining things.
Which means he’s gonna want me to keep digging into Anika’s life.
Dammit.
I knew I should have stayed home tonight.
GAGE, FINSBURY
00:21:52 // 6-JUL-2059
I don’t hang around the hotel long. The TAC team clears the ballroom and I let myself be herded into the commotion outside. Seems like every response vehicle in the city is here, and the air is thick with the buzz of feed drones fighting for camera position. A few thousand people flooded out of the hotel and onto the streets and the entire road is blocked. It’s chaos.
After I push my way through the crowd I duck into an alley and zigzag my way south until I’m free. Someone probably will want to talk to me—I’m sure Chaddah will come knocking as soon as she sees my name on the guest list—but she can come to me. I’m not spending another night in line behind a thousand other witnesses waiting for my turn to say the same thing. I don’t know anything more than anyone else, other than I have a distinct knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’m about to hop a Sküte home but Dub calls before I can even get one hailed. He’s heard about the heist and wants to make sure Anika and I are safe, and he sighs with relief when I tell him we are. Or at least Anika was when she left. Who knows who might have pissed her off on the way home.
He wants to talk, in person, and I know there’s no point in arguing, so I tell him to meet me at Avenue Open Kitchen, a little hole-in-the-wall diner to the west of downtown.
I get there before him and take a booth in the back, slide into the cracked, green faux-leather banquette, and when the bot rolls up and places a paper napkin and glass of water on the table I order a coffee and smoked veat sandwich. It’s still early, and the place is only half full, but it’ll steadily fill up as the drunks stumble in to line their stomachs with something greasy before they call it a night.
Dub rolls in fifteen minutes later. The restaurant is small, just a single row of booths and six stools at the counter, and his beefy skyn seems to cast a shadow as he stalks down the aisle.
“Thank goodness you weren’t hurt,” he says in a loud voice as he drops into the seat across from me. Everyone in the place is looking at us, and I shush him with my hand. He glances around in apology and hunches over the table. “What happened?”
“Somebody ripped off Humanitech’s arena skyns,” I say. “Took four of ’em. Flew right out the window.”
His mouth drops open. “You’re sure? Four?”
I nod. “Somehow got through the safeties and walked out with them.”
“Shit. That’s … that’s not good.”
“Nope.”
The bot comes to drop off my sandwich and tries to take Dub’s order but he shoos it away. I don’t think his skyn could even digest the stuff they serve here.
“They won’t get far.” He pats his chest. “Humanitech has their skyns tagged. Standards will track them down.”
“Maybe,” I say, thinking back to how efficiently the heist went. They were prepared. In and out like clockwork. They w
ere showoffs, but they didn’t leave anything to chance. “Wouldn’t surprise me if they had a workaround already figured for that.”
Dub sinks further into his seat. He’s feeling this like it happened to him personally and not to a massive multinational corporation. He’s quiet for a moment, then looks up, a sliver of hope in his eyes. “What about Anika, though? Did you talk to her?”
The answer won’t make him feel any better, but I should tell him.
“Yeah,” I say. “We chatted.”
His head perks up. “And?”
I take a moment and choose my words carefully, stall by picking the top slice of bread off my sandwich and slathering it with mustard. I’m still ninety-five percent sure she’s just messed up from everything she’s been through—losing a kid and finding out you killed yourself but not knowing why is sure to mess you up—but there’s a chance there’s more to it. Something’s niggling in my gut.
“There’s a chance, a slight chance, you might not be imagining things,” I say.
He winces and his broad shoulders slump further. “Gosh, I was hoping I was wrong.”
“Likely you still are. But I was standing beside her when the shooting started and she didn’t blink. I served with some hard guys back in the Forces, but I never met anyone who doesn’t at least flinch when bullets start flying.”
Dub processes this, then his eyes widen. His voice rises. “You’re saying she might have been in on it?”
I raise my hands. “I’m not saying anything. Who knows what’s going on with her, but something is. She’s been through a lot—I know they don’t just let anyone become a novi. You’re sure she passed the psychological tests?”
“Of course,” Dub says. “But no one who tries out for the gladiators is totally sane. You think she could be dangerous?”
I pick up half of my sandwich and take a bite of the salty imitation meat, chew and swallow while I consider my answer.
“I don’t,” I finally say. “But she sure wasn’t worried about catching a bullet.”
Dub makes a noise in his throat and I take another bite. I know what’s coming next.
“So you’ll take the case?” he asks.
Case? What case? I finish chewing and take a swig of water, stalling, but I can’t ignore his pleading look. “Like I said before, I don’t know what I’ll be able to dig up that background checks didn’t.”
“But you could try—”
I take a breath. “Her psych workup, can I see it?” I ask, half-hoping he’ll refuse and give me an excuse to beg off, but he doesn’t hesitate, and a moment later I get notification he’s sent me a trove of documents. Looks like interviews, a detailed history, psychological profiling—the whole deal.
“That’s everything I have,” he says. “But keep it to yourself. I could get in trouble for sharing it.”
I send a thought to Connie and get her reviewing everything, but I’m not expecting much. “And I’ll need anything that comes up from the investigation into the stolen skyns.”
“Whatever you want,” Dub says.
Now what? “I suppose I could review Anika’s feed history, dig through her tube archives, first-person her Decimation Island run, see if something happened to her in-game that triggered her suicide—though I’m sure it’s been relived a million times by now, and if no one else has found anything …”
“Great,” Dub says. “Whatever you can do.”
The Decimation Island sub fees aren’t cheap though, and I’ll need the platinum level to rewatch old games. I could try to use the ad-supported route for Anika’s tube history, but it’ll tack days onto the search. He sees me hesitating.
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to ask, but I’ll need to sign up for a DI season pass, and the subscriptions to Anika’s feed, and I know you already paid for this suit …”
He blinks, then realizes what I’m saying. “Done,” he says a moment later, and a notification tells me I’m rich. There’s a million crypto in one of my accounts.
“No, Dub. That’s way too much. I only need a few thousand for the fees—”
“Keep it,” Dub says. “I have more than I need.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Why not?” he asks, leaning in, his voice hushed like he’s upset. “You need it and I have it to give. You don’t need to be here, helping me, but you are and I appreciate the hell out of it. Besides, I’ve got more money than I’ll ever use in a hundred lifetimes. I’ll never notice the difference.”
It would help. I could get my own place again, let Shelt have his room back. I could even start saving to get Connie that skyn. My pride’s fighting me, but what the hell.
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks, Dub, that’s damn generous of you.”
Dub smiles out the side of his mouth, playing it down. “It’s nothing. Besides, a million dollars ain’t what it used to be.”
“I’ll do some poking around, let you know what I find out.”
He nods. “The novi trials are on Sunday. We need to know before then.”
“On it,” I say, though honestly, I hope I don’t find anything. I barely know her, but Anika seems like a good kid trying to hold herself together the best she can after all the shit she’s been though.
At least that’s what I want to think, but even still there’s a part of me that knows this won’t end well.
It never does.
AniK@
99:53:23 // 11 Players Remain.
You’re trapped in the red, squatting in the shadow of a deep green fern, with only two minutes of safe-time left before the prowlers quit their snarling and pounce. Eleven players are still alive, and everyone’s fighting to stay that way. The next one to die will end the round, and no one wants to go out in eleventh place.
The kill zone closes in one square kilometer hex at a time, ten hexes an hour, until there’s ten minutes left and only one hex remains open. After that the zone pushes in from the sides until it either closes at hour one hundred or only ten players remain. Once in the red, only the players who still have safe-time are spared from the bots immediately going aggro, and squads start to consider whether one of their members is expendable.
You’ve tried everything you can to find a way into the green, but the zone’s centered on a clearing around one of the excavated tombs of Sky Temple Ruin, just some tents and the low stone walls, and OVRshAdo and his team have it on lockdown, every angle of approach covered. Anyone who’s tried to sneak in was cut down, and their corpses are sprawled on the grass.
With OVRshAdo’s foursome commanding the center, that leaves five enemy players in the red with you and Linker. Who knows, maybe you two have the most time left. You could stay in the red and hope to run out the clock, but you never know. There’s a good chance you and Linker could be at the bottom of the safe-time pool and doing nothing could lose you the game.
“We need to move,” you hiss, trying to keep your voice down. In the thick jungle it’s nearly impossible to see more than a few feet, but you know there’s a team of three around to the north, and probably a duo out on the other side of the circle. The duo would be the best team to challenge but at this point they’re too far away.
You grit your teeth, frustrated. Not like this. Not so soon.
You should have been more proactive with your hundred hours, gone for kills, run hotspots to get better loot. It seemed like the best idea was to play conservative, but now that you’re stuck at the end, about to lose your very first game, if only you had filled up your safe-time reserve, or found a camo cloak or a drone to spot enemy locations …
“If we move we’re dead,” Linker hisses back, his eyes jigging in the low jungle light. This is his second game and he’s never been so close to winning—only one player away—and the tension’s eating at him.
“I’m not dying to the zone,” you tell him. Only ninety seconds before the bots attack. You need to go now, by yourself if necessary. Maybe you can get a lucky shot on someone, or hold
off the prowlers long enough for someone else to die first.
You lift yourself up to a crouch and scan your surroundings through the visor over your face, searching for a clue as to where the other teams might be, but with nothing to go on you can only swallow and roll the dice. You ADS the bullpup and pick your way forward, hope you spot someone first.
A prowler’s been stalking you for the past few minutes. You’re in its territory and it knows you’ll soon be vulnerable. You keep it in your peripheral vision as you peer through the broad thick leaves of a rubber plant, searching for any sign of movement, for a hint of something that shouldn’t be there.
You flick your eyes to the countdown at the edge of your vision—twenty-seven seconds. It’s a long way around the edge of the zone, and the other players could be anywhere. You’re not going to find them.
There’s only one player you for sure know the location of … Linker.
He’s the only option left.
And the second you think it, you know he’s decided the same thing.
You leap instantly to the left, startling yourself with a dodge that happens before you’ve even decided to move, like someone’s pulling your strings, just as a shotgun blast rips a hole through the rubber plant you were looking through. You land in a roll and dive back right, avoiding the next shot that thuds in the wet earth just as you clear out of the way, and the next leap puts you behind the thick trunk of a tree that absorbs the third shot.
Blood roars in your ears as you catch your breath. Thank Christ you went after the muscle juice—if it weren’t for the extra speed he’d have caught you. Behind you the prowler barks—that’s the twenty-second warning. Its green eyes will be pulsing red, counting down the seconds until it charges. You can’t worry about the bot though, Linker’s crashing through the jungle, trying to swing around to get an angle on you. He’s moved far enough the targeting assist in the visor lost track of him, and he’s still got seven shots left before he needs to reload