by M. S. Farzan
Lucky Snake’s clientele looked as hard as its decor. A motley representative of underraces and humans looked up at us as we entered the bar, dark eyes gleaming suspiciously. I felt self-conscious in my standard issue clothing, standing out like a sore thumb in the midst of revolutionaries.
Gloric strode confidently up to the unvarnished bar, signaling the huge auric behind it for a drink. The little gnome could barely see over the counter, but he pulled himself up onto a stool and beckoned us over.
I could feel eyes on me as we walked across the room, and resisted the temptation to use my lenses to look up records for each of the patrons. The place was a treasure trove of rev sympathizers.
“Want anything?” Gloric asked as we joined him at the bar. I shook my head, preferring to keep my wits about me for the time being. Alina ordered a soft drink as Tribe went over to tinker with the jukebox.
I put my back to the bar to survey the room, trying to pick out Doubleshot from the crowd. Most of Lucky Snake’s clientele had gone back to their drinking and games of chance, the low rumble of talk and dice filling the concrete room with sound. A table of aurics towards the middle of the room was still giving us the stinkeye. I smiled pleasantly in their direction.
“Where do we find her?” I said to Gloric out of the corner of my mouth, waving cheerily at the revolutionaries.
“Oh, she’s here,” the gnome said, collecting a handful of shots in his little hands and hopping down off the bar stool. “Just don’t want to meet her empty-handed.”
Alina and I followed him to the back corner of the room, Buster trailing behind us and sniffing curiously. A table of aurics and humans were in the middle of some Hold ‘Em variant, digital chips piled around their cards haphazardly. A dwarf sat on the opposite side, her boots propped up on the table nonchalantly. Her wide brimmed hat shaded her face in the low light, and a cigar glowed red behind her handful of cards.
Her eyes, glistening in shadow, flicked towards me. She spoke one word, the cigar dipping. “Scram.”
The rest of the table looked up at us, then back at the dwarf, who tipped her head curtly to the side, revealing a fringe of orange hair beneath her hat. The card players collected their money and left, joining other tables.
“What have we here, Glory?” the dwarf asked, taking a pull at the cigar. Her eyes never left my face.
“Evening, Doubleshot,” Gloric said affably, setting the shot glasses on the table and taking a seat. “OK if my friends join us?”
The dwarf clasped the cigar between two meaty fingers, sweeping her hand briskly in accord. The motion opened her jacket front slightly, revealing a thick leather vest and bolo tie, along with an enormous ceridium revolver at her right hip. From reading through her file, I expected there to be an identical one on her left.
Alina and I sat down across from her, Buster plopping down under a chair and falling asleep instantly. I didn’t like having my back to the door, but didn’t have much choice.
The dwarf put her cigar on its side in an ashtray, blowing out a cloud of smoke and grabbing a couple of shots. Finally taking her eyes off of me, she tossed back the amber liquid.
“What can I do you for?” she drawled in a sooty voice, wiping her mouth with a thick hand.
“Well,” Gloric began, skipping pleasantries, “we need someone to take us to the Sigil.”
“What for?”
“It’s a long story,” I spoke, measuring the dwarf with my eyes. She returned my gaze and held it, searching for fear or intimidation. Not finding any, she nodded slowly, taking another two shots.
“Give me the short version,” she said.
I looked around me, making sure we were out of earshot from the rest of the room, and sped through the relevant pieces of my story, leaving out any mention of classified information. The dwarf listened patiently, asking a question here and there for clarification.
When I finished, she crossed her arms, sizing me up first, then Alina. Finally, she turned back to Gloric, and a ray of light caught the side of her face, revealing a flush, plump visage and round nose.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me I owe you one,” she said to the gnome.
The technomancer smiled, toying with one of the shot glasses. “Chinatown didn’t fix itself,” he said meaningfully. “Besides, it’ll be fun!”
The dwarf looked back in my direction, and frowned.
“This bloke giving you trouble, Doubleshot?” I felt a large hand fall on my shoulder.
Out of reflex, I grabbed the hand with my own, standing suddenly and pushing my chair into the offender’s kneecaps. I twisted under his elbow, grabbing his wrist with one hand and using it to bend his arm in a Z shape. He grunted in pain, and I continued the motion, flipping him over the chair and onto the floor but keeping my grip on the wrist lock.
As if on cue, the bar’s country music skipped, Tribe accomplishing whatever he was trying to do with the jukebox. A dancehall hit, all beats and bass, began to play.
They all attacked at once. The table of aurics and humans had surrounded our little corner, murder in their eyes. I let go of the one on the ground, kicking him in the face as I stepped over him and under the wild swing of the auric on my left, grabbing the back of his shirt and driving my knee into his midsection. He let out a harsh breath as I threw him into the group of attackers, tripping a human woman brandishing an electric club.
A tall half-auric to my right hooked a beer bottle towards my head, and I moved with the motion, punching him in the jaw with my fist as I caught the inside of his wrist with my free hand. I continued my punch over his bicep, folding his arm behind his shoulder and grabbing my own wrist in a two-way lock. Turning my hips, I sent him crashing into a nearby table, using my spin to connect my boot with the chest of another advancing human.
I heard the giveaway hum of ceridium weapons being readied, and came out of my turn to see several of the revolutionaries pulling pistols out of their coats. Most of the bar had cleared away from the immediate vicinity, and Alina was just getting out of her chair and to her feet. The wolf had woken from his nap and was poised to jump into the fray.
My hands leapt to my pistol and nightblade, drawing them smoothly. I trained them on the two closest attackers, but noticed motion in my peripheral vision.
I saw Doubleshot move, and it was unlike anything I had witnessed. She swung a boot off of the table and onto a chair, using it to propel her on top of the table. Impossibly fast, her long-barreled revolvers appeared in her hands, pointing threateningly at the auric on the floor and another next to the table. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she was thick, imposing from her perch on the table.
“Call them off, Largo,” the dwarf said quietly.
One of the revolutionaries, a man-sized fellow with greenish skin and a handlebar mustache, squinted at her and spat. “Auric king’s looking for this bunch.”
“Auric king can wait,” Doubleshot replied placidly, with no hint of threat in her voice. Her stance in the dim light gave her the appearance of an executioner, her pistols glowing blue and deadly. “They’re under my protection.”
The man shifted from one foot to the other, deliberating. There was a tension-filled silence, punctuated ludicrously by Tribe’s music emanating from the jukebox. The other bar patrons watched on coolly, and I could see the huge bartender wiping the same glass over and over again, doing his best to ignore us. Tribe unobtrusively made his way through the crowd, smoothly stepping in between tables and chairs.
“Auric king won’t like you getting in his way,” the man said at last.
“You have five seconds,” the dwarf raised her voice slightly, cocking her revolvers.
The auric looked at me, and I recognized him as one of the assassins from They Might Be Giant. I must have started, as his eyes twitched.
He let out a breath through his snout, turning back towards Doubleshot and putting away his gun.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to the room, taking
one last glance at me as he left.
I stashed my weapons as the group cleared out, watching them leave the bar. Alina and Gloric helped put back furniture as Buster looked on, growling softly. Seeing that the danger had passed, Tribe diverted his path and made his way over to the bar.
I turned back to the table, finding Doubleshot back in her seat with her pistols safely stowed and her hat in her hand. Her hair sparkled brilliantly in an orange bun crowned at the top of her head, and her skin was ruddy in the bar light. She had a kind face, with wrinkles at the corner of green eyes and a strong jaw that supported chubby cheeks. Her long auric ears pressed against the side of her head, half a shade lighter than two small horns protruding from her forehead.
The dwarf put her feet up and pulled her hat back on, grabbing her cigar from the ashtray with one hand and a couple of shots with the other. I righted my chair and sat down, reaching for one of the extra glasses.
“Well, um…so!” Gloric said, passing a shot over to me. “What do you think? Can you take us?”
The dwarf looked at me, and I raised my glass in salute. She lifted hers and we drank. It tasted like bourbon, neat and impure, little better than brown moonshine. It burned like fire but I managed to swallow it without coughing.
We slammed the glasses on the table at the same time, and she took a puff from her still-lit cigar.
“If I do this, we’re square,” she said to Gloric.
The technomancer took a long look at Alina, who inclined her head in assent.
Doubleshot took another moment, crossing her arms again and blowing smoke.
“Alright,” she said at length, then looked at me piercingly. “But I want four names wiped from the records when you get access to the database.”
“No problem,” I croaked, trying to keep the bourbon down. “You have my word.”
The dwarf nodded. “I’ll take the job.”
SIX
The Sigil is a charlatan, a minor player who conflates gambling on information with divination.
-William D. Karthax, NIGHT Inquisitor General
After some initial skepticism on my part, we ate some of Lucky Snake’s surprisingly edible tavern food and returned to collect our truck, which sat alone in the empty parking lot. The evening had deepened into another warm night, a light breeze drifting from the Bay to ruffle my short hair and overcoat.
I felt a pang of jealousy when Doubleshot rode up on her modded hog. Of a classic design, it had all of the bells and whistles of a modern motorcycle with the same deafening sound that had been popular at the turn of the century. It made me miss my cruiser.
“It’s a straight shot on the 80 once we get out of Oakland,” she explained, pulling up to Alina’s driver side window. The dwarf had replaced her large hat for a simple reinforced helmet and kerchief that covered most of her face. “We’ll stop in Mystic before crossing the border.”
Alina nodded, clarifying with Tribe some ground rules about whose music was allowed to be played while driving, and then followed Vasshka through the harbor district and onto the freeway.
I settled in for the drive, looking to my left towards San Francisco. The city was lit up brilliantly in a multitude of colors across the Bay, which was a deeper shade of black than the sky at this time of night. A crescent of fog had coalesced around the far side of the peninsula, creeping around the northern end to block my view of the Golden Gate. Only the unlit towers of the old bridge peeked through the haze, ominous shadows threatening to pierce the heavens.
As the underrace population began to grow in the thirties and forties, so too did public demand and government funding inflate to support NIGHT involvement at the city, state, and national stages. The U.S. society at large had become used to surveillance at every level, and it was effortless, cathartic even, to turn that scrutiny on what was perceived to be a new set of species.
Pockets of resistance formed to combat the human rights violations that came with the ghettoization and profiling of the growing racial populations in the already impacted urban centers. Some of the demonstrations were peaceful, others less so, but most were uncoordinated on a national scale until Thog’run II, a first-generationer and renowned warrior and revolutionary, claimed his throne in 2063.
The self-professed auric king united the scattered underrace resistance movements under one banner that promised equal rights and protection for all of the new races. Equally important, it provided the physical and philosophical space for an important identity that the disenfranchised underrace communities craved dearly: that of nationhood. It took a few bloody years and a number of uprisings, but Thog’run was able to establish the capital of his empire in the caves beneath the Marin headlands, mockingly close to San Francisco and the seat of NIGHT power in the United States. Just months later, he put out the word that all underraces, from every corner of the Earth, would be welcome and provided for within the new nation of Aurichome.
The auric king called, and the revolutionaries answered. Uprisings cropped up around the world in support of Thog’run’s decree, and the underraces flocked to the North Bay, gradually taking over the coast from Sausalito to Fort Bragg. Even humans moved to join the new nation and underground pockets of resistance, buoyed by the sense of freedom afforded by the dictatorship and away from military-controlled democracy. Aurichome provided a release from a world run by armies and corporations, a return to a simpler way of life where all were welcome. The auric king would take anyone, provided that they recognized him as the sole and rightful ruler of Aurichome.
The NIGHTs responded in the way they knew best, but found that even their technologically advanced weaponry and instruments were no match for the aurics’ guerilla tactics. Having made a motion to nuke the entire underside of Northern California, their hand was stayed by an uneasy majority in Congress. The government realized it couldn’t beat Thog’run in his own territory, so it did the next best thing: made everyone else the enemy.
You wouldn’t be able to catch any of the powers that be confessing on holovid, but there was a common understanding that the general underrace populace that remained outside of Aurichome was paying for the perceived sins of Thog’run II. Aurics were stopped at every checkpoint, forced to produce identification upon demand, and denied most basic rights when it came to the law. An auric that had a second cousin living in Aurichome would be called a revolutionary, thrown in the Virtual Penitentiary and most likely forgotten about. The media already had a blueprint for paranoia from the Red and Green Scares of previous decades, and acted accordingly, changing the colors to the blue and white of Thog’run’s banner.
The Oxidium epidemic, known colloquially as the rage plague, made matters only worse. The first generation of underraces had been taking the drug experimentally in an attempt to reverse the phenotypic effects of ceridium, which had been shown to work in some clinical trials. It didn’t do much outside of giving them a nasty habit and another reason to hate themselves and the way they looked, reinforcing the widely held misconception that they were a different species altogether from homo sapiens. When the rage plague began appearing among second-generationers, the underraces suddenly started to need Oxidium to prevent themselves from becoming bloodthirsty monsters, oblivious to everything but their blinding fury. The drug proved to have some usefulness after all, but it was a hollow comfort.
We stopped briefly in Sacramento, a sprawling metropolis that dwarfed San Francisco in space if not population, to grab a few more supplies, and continued east, keeping to the upper traffic whenever possible.
The journey was mercifully uneventful, factories and strip malls zooming past the truck’s windows and eventually giving way to the thick evergreen forests of the Sierra foothills. My companions and I kept our own counsel, lulled into silence by the quiet hum of the SUV’s antigravity boosters. Even Buster sat morosely in between the two front seats, chin propped up gloomily on the dashboard.
Alina slowed as she pulled the SUV through Truckee, following Vasshka off the stret
ch of the freeway that rode through the town. What was once the gateway to the mountain range from the California side was now a government-regulated checkpoint that sat uneasily up against the underrace territory, itself aligned with Aurichome. The dwarf guided us through a series of backroads and back onto the 80 without incident, taking us into the mountains.
The traffic this far east was nonexistent, and after a short time on the freeway, Doubleshot slowed her bike to a crawl, then stopped completely. At her signal, Alina cut the SUV’s engine and we all prepared to get out.
“Just a minute, Alina,” Gloric said, rummaging through his backpack in the seat next to me.
The gnome produced a small cloth satchel about the size of a grapefruit and embroidered in orange and black.
“In case there’s trouble,” he offered, handing it to her.
The Pitcher took the bag quizzically, furrowing her delicate brow. Buster and Tribe crowded the front cab as she untied its leather knot, reaching inside to pull out a blue crystal globe about the size of her hand. A molded seam traversed the sphere in a figure eight pattern.
“Is this?” she said slowly.
“In case there’s trouble!” the gnome repeated, helping her to press a recessed button on the globe’s exterior. At his touch, the mock stitching glowed a brighter blue, revealing a computer chip suspended within the ball like a fly in amber.
“And I?” Alina stammered.
“Throw it like you normally would!” the Technomancer explained, beaming over his invention. “It doesn’t have the appropriate coloration, but the weighting is correct. And the best part about it...”
He pressed the button again, and the globe began to hum.
“...Ceridium-veined CPU, with a reinforced microcrystal outer core and spell of returning. It’ll be very hard to break, and is programmed to reappear at the point of release on impact.”