Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  Razorface didn’t stop, but he hesitated long enough for Mitch to fall into step. He didn’t say anything, either.

  “Where you going?”

  “I got a word, piggy. Word in my ear about a witness. Going to go get my boys now, go pay a visit. Might mean doing some things a cop wouldn’t want to know about, is all.”

  “Razor.” Mitch thought about laying a hand on the big man’s sleeve and decided he’d rather keep it. “I’m not a cop anymore, man. Not once the review board finishes with me. I blew it.”

  “Wondered when the fuck you were gonna get round to telling me that.” The hulking warlord stopped midstride, fluidly turned, and looked down at Mitch. “You don’t mind getting killed young, I got a use for you.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Razor?”

  “You want a fucking job or what?”

  No different than waiting for the SWAT team, really, Mitch thought later that night, ear tuned for the sound of gunfire. They sat in Razor’s Cadillac in an alley near a specific house in New Britain, so far outside Razorface’s territory that his boys weren’t even wearing their colors.

  Mitch checked his heads-up for the thirtieth time—still only a little past one—and sighed. Razorface reached out and punched him in the shoulder. “They can’t tell us anything dead.”

  “How come you drive your own car, Razor?”

  “I like to. How come you talk so fucking much?”

  “I suck at waiting.”

  “Learn.” Razorface shifted in his chair, clinking earrings shining in the darkness like a pirate’s. He reached up and touched a gold ear clip nestled in among them, opened his door. “Moving.”

  “Copy.” Mitch came out the passenger side low, following the leather-jacketed ghost that seemed to vanish into the dimness. He palmed a nine millimeter that wasn’t the gun he usually carried and thumbed the safety off, checking the weight of three extra clips swinging in his jacket pocket. “Didn’t hear any shots.”

  Razorface didn’t answer. Shadowy figures surrounded them as they moved around the house to the back. Mitch passed a pair of Hammerheads watching the front door from outside the gleam of a single streetlight. Razorface nodded to them as he passed. Mitch stepped wide around the red puddle seeping from the corpse at their feet. Knife. Of course, how silly of me. You’re in it now, Mitchy, he thought, and Mashaya. He crouched low as a staccato pattering of bullets finally shattered windows on the second story. Outbound. More gunfire followed, in earnest, and Razorface stuck tighter to the shadows.

  Broken glass tinkled away from his boot as he slipped through uncut grass. The rear door stood open, spilling a wedge of light across the yard, and Razorface came up on it at an angle. A dozen gangsters—kids, teenagers—surrounded him and Mitch. One of the kids moved toward the door in the darkness, and Razor stopped him with an outstretched hand.

  “After me,” he hissed, which Mitch thought was pretty ballsy—even if there were Hammerheads in the house already. From the grin on the warlord’s face, Mitch thought the bravado was intentional—the old cock fluffing his tail feathers in front of the chicks. What a politician he would have made.

  Mitch followed Razorface into the kitchen. Blood on stained linoleum, roach-crawling dishes stacked in the basin. A lace curtain hung over the sink, shredded by a shotgun blast. There was evidence of money spent in the place, but no care taken of it. Razorface stepped over three bodies along the way, frowning at the second one. It was one of his boys.

  Mitch stepped over the body, too, careful not to leave footprints in the blood. We’re shedding trace evidence all over this place. Not that there was likely to be much investigation of this. Another gangland killing. I’m just seeing this one from the inside.

  Razorface’s boys had the prisoner seated in a kitchen chair in the dining room, well back from the windows and covered by two gunmen. Mitch swung out to the gangster’s left as he crossed the red-sticky carpeting, frowning as he recognized the slender, broken-nosed man under guard, hands bound behind him. A Latin King, a man with some clout outside of Razorface’s domain. Rinaldo Garcia.

  “Garcia,” Razorface said. “Ronny. Hello, man.”

  Mitch noticed a blackened eye, noticed the way Garcia’s face blanched when Razorface favored him with a smile that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. “Razor,” Garcia started, “I dunno what you here for, but I ain’t been nowhere near your turf.”

  “Uh-huh. I got some pictures for you to look at, Ronnie. I hear one of your boys was driving for somebody in Hartford a few weeks back. I want to know if you recognize these people—” He slid the data slice Mitch had given him out of a jacket pocket and keyed it on, displaying the holos of the suspected Canadian couriers. “And I want a description of the gunman who shot my girl Mashaya Duclose.”

  Leather creaking, Razorface leaned over the Latin King. Garcia flinched away. “I don’t know nothing, man.”

  “Uh. Ain’t what I heard.” Mitch thought Razor would get in the other man’s face, but instead he spun on the ball of his foot and ambled away. He hesitated, considering the glass-topped dining table, and then looked back at Garcia. Razorface sighed. “Ronny. I could kick this table over, get all dramatic. I could get your bitch in here and work her over until she pukes blood.” He shrugged, spreading big hands.

  The tickle of unease in Mitch’s gut rose up, fresh as a flooding river. “Razorface.”

  “Shut up, piggy.”

  Mitch bit his lip. Is this bad cop worse cop? Or is he really going to beat the stuffing out of some sixteen-year-old girl who got caught in the wrong man’s bed? I’d have to put a bullet in him, and he knows it.

  As if reading his thoughts, Razorface turned to hide his face from Garcia and skated Mitch a wink. Mitch hid a quick grin, still wondering. And why can I trust him?

  Razorface turned back to his victim. “Fuck, man, you ain’t giving me a choice. You gotta do this for me, or you know what I have to do. I can’t be getting no reputation for going sweet in my old age.”

  “Razorface,” Garcia put in. “Man, you in a world of hurt. You know your little kingdom coming down around your ears. Any minute, man.”

  “Razor,” Mitch said again, a little louder this time. Is it really that bad? He got a broadside look at Razorface’s expression. Shit. It is.

  A glare was his only answer, and Razorface kept talking to the damp-skinned Garcia. “You tell me about this gunman, Ronny. You look at these pictures.” He leaned down, steel teeth all but brushing Garcia’s ear. “Or I’m gonna have to start biting fingers off until you do.”

  Mitch swallowed hard and took a step forward.

  “Shit, Razor, I don’t know nothing, I swear!”

  Mitch flinched from the scream as Razorface reached down and snapped Garcia’s pinky. “Lie to me again, you know what happens.” He glanced up, gave Mitch a smile and a nod. “You wanna wait outside, Detective?”

  Please, God, let this be psychology, Mitch pleaded silently. What have I gotten into? Goddamn.

  He turned and went outside.

  Fifteen minutes later, Razorface joined him on the back porch, where he stood chainsmoking in the darkness. “It was Maker’s sister, piggy,” he said without preamble. “She’s the one put the bullet in Mashaya, and she’s the one working with the crew who gave Ronny and his boys the Hammers.”

  “What’d you have to do to get that?” Mitch asked, more because he felt he should face up to it than because he wanted to know.

  “Broke four fingers and his foot,” Razorface answered. He pulled out a package of cigarettes and shook one out. Mitch already had a lighter in his hand, and offered it to Razorface. Coals flared in the darkness and pale, acrid smoke coiled upward.

  “Would you really have bitten his fingers off?”

  “Shit, man,” Razorface answered. “Can’t say. Never had to go that far yet. Can’t let myself get a sweet reputation, though.”

  Thirteen years ago:

  in the Heavy Iron

&
nbsp; University of Guelph

  Tuesday 21 June, 2049

  7:00 P.M.

  Elspeth’s VR self sighed, stood, walked to the door. Somewhere her corporeal body hung swathed in black permeables, bathed in the fluid of a full-immersion tank. “Dick. I read your books when I was a little girl. You made me … you made me want to be a scientist. You made me believe that understanding how things worked was the greatest adventure a human being could have.”

  Dick’s fingers rippled silently on the arms of his chair.

  Elspeth glanced back at him. “But this is wrong. I’m making people crazy, Dick. I have to stop it, before somebody else dies.” I can’t let my work be used to support these endless, soul-numbing wars. She wondered if Feynman, the Feynman of Los Alamos, would understand. Perhaps. Perhaps he would.

  “People are often irrational, Elspeth. You don’t control their actions.” You do control your own.

  She turned and leaned back against the door, tugging her hand away from her crucifix. Bad habit. “Research shouldn’t mean that people die.”

  “Elspeth. Are you saying that there are things that should not be explored?” Open challenge in his inquisitive gaze, a bit of mockery in the smile, fingers drumming.

  She bit her lip, resenting the challenge, resenting him even more for being right. “I have to end the experiment, Richard. I have to shut down the machine.” He knew. He had told her that he had found a way to abrogate the virtual reality, and deal with the computer without intermediaries. “Comforting lies,” he had called them, with a grin.

  He was silent for a moment, and then he held out his hands—unreal hands, hands that would never hold a lover or a pen. “That’s murder, too, El.”

  “It can’t be. I made you. You’re …” She forged ahead. “You’re not real.”

  A gentle smile, a fierce look in the eye. “Nonsense. Or you’re not real, because your parents made you.”

  “That’s a spurious analogy, Dick.”

  “That depends on your point of view.”

  She shook her head. “No. No, it doesn’t. Only God can make life. You haven’t got a soul, Dick. You’re a construct. Patterns of electrical activity in a piezoelectric crystal.”

  Feynman looked at her, and a manic light burned in his eyes. “And you are patterns of electrical activity in meat. Weigh me your soul and I’ll include it in the equation.”

  She turned the handle on the door, turned back. “I feel like I should talk to the others.”

  “Others? Oh.” The physicist shrugged. “I tried showing them the library. I tried explaining … they’re not independent. They can’t think, Elspeth, only react. Or act in limited, predetermined patterns. Maybe given time, they might have developed. But I …” He gestured again. “I think I corrupted them. They couldn’t process the contradictions …”

  “Dick, are you saying that you drove my programs mad?”

  His eyebrows quirked and his hands danced around. “I can call them up. I suppose you would say, I can run the programs. But I can’t force them to adapt to realizing that they aren’t what they remember being.”

  Elspeth watched him, nibbling on the edge of her finger.

  Feynman chopped at the air with a gesture of dismissal. “Why worry? You can always restore them from backup, right?” A taunting grin. “And you’re going to pull the plug anyway. So who cares?”

  Elspeth tapped her hands on the door handle, and looked at her creation, long and hard, and wondered how God felt when Eve told him where to get off. Pride and sorrow mingled in her chest, and she turned back to the door.

  1030 hours, Thursday 14 September, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  I’ve been assigned my own office, in a different wing from where Gabe and Dunsany sit, and I’ve just called to check in with Face for the day and had to leave a message. I don’t want to leave him the work number, and I’m still too paranoid to leave my HCD on all the time. Same problem with Face—convenient little buggers, but you can track usage through wireless networks and GPS. Better to leave them off if you’re on the DL, only flip them on when you need to check your mail.

  He’ll leave a message if he needs me.

  When Valens taps on the open door, I’m sitting at the work table in the corner by the window, drinking coffee and pondering a little trip through the Internet to see if I can discover the whereabouts of a certain Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert, late of Montreal. I spent the morning studying the specs for the good ship Indefatigable, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. Done better.

  The answer does not make me happy. Seen the dark body sooner, reacted faster. And I don’t know what the hell I can do about either of those. Keep losing ships.

  They’re not real ships. Which doesn’t matter as much as it should.

  “Good morning, Fred.” I stand up as he enters.

  He glances at the display over my desk, where a schematic of the virtual starship hangs, slowly revolving. “Studying yesterday’s record?”

  “Just finished the review. That’s a heck of an obstacle course you have set up …” Sir. I bite it off before it gets away from me.

  “Meant to be. You didn’t disappoint us, Casey, if that’s what you’re thinking. You handled that first run better than the other candidates we tried did after their upgrades.”

  That sparks my interest. “Tried. Past tense?”

  He shrugs. “We had three good candidates in your group, excluding the younger volunteers. One left the program. One—our best candidate—passed away in an accident.” A sidelong smile. “An accident unrelated to the implants, I hasten to add.”

  “Of course. Number three?”

  “Still with us.”

  “When do I get to meet him?”

  “You don’t. He’s actually in an orbital research facility on Clarke Station. Bit too far to commute. And you just blew his response times away.” Valens walks to my desk and runs a finger over the interface plate, spinning the Indefatigable about its axis.

  I cross the plush, lavender-gray carpeting to stand at his elbow. “I’m not fast enough, Fred. I hope the simulations for the actual vehicles will run a bit slower.”

  “The aircraft sims? Well, Casey, here’s the thing. You’re not going to be seeing any aircraft sims.” He shoves a hand into his coat pocket and turns to look me dead in the eye.

  Was that a threat? “Pardon?”

  He drops a folder on my desk, covering the optics. The holo winks out. “Those are your clearances. You’re in. You’re also reactivated, Master Warrant. Welcome back to the C.A.”

  Eyes blinking, I listen to the silence, waiting for his words to change into something that makes sense to me. No.

  No.

  Breathe.

  “Qu’est ce que fuck? Valens, you said civilian.”

  “Casey, I lied.”

  Seasick, I step away, stammering, “Fucking Christ. Ces sont des conneries. No. You can’t do this, Fred.”

  “Actually,” he says, “I can. Chapter and verse is in your paperwork. I suggest you go over it and sign it at your leisure.”

  “Or you’ll send me to jail? Not much of a threat.”

  He tips his head toward the folder on my desk, keeps talking as if I haven’t said a word. “And you’re going to go along with it, too. And smile. Do you want to know why?”

  God, I want to break his neck. He’s so fragile. So slow. Just bones and mud, and I could take him apart with one hand. And that would get me—nothing. Play the game, Jenny; you’re a dead woman anyway. Remember. Sacrifice play, and your only job is to get the runner home.

  Shit, I’ve been living in the States too long if I’m thinking in baseball metaphors.

  Chewing my lip, I manage to get a syllable out. “Why?”

  “Because there’s no way they’re handing the keys to a real starship to a civilian, and you’re the only one I’ve got who has a hope of flying the
fucking thing without killing everybody on board. Assuming you come through surgery okay, of course.”

  I almost sit down on the rug. Of course. I lay my left hand on the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Real starship.”

  “The Montreal,” he says. He points toward the ceiling. “Finishing construction as we speak. Designed on the same specs as the toy you were playing with yesterday. We’ve already had to contend with two sabotage attempts during construction—”

  Sabotage. A fine French word. “Terrorists?”

  “In space? You don’t build a starship planetside. Our intelligence suggests the Chinese. In any case, we need some very special people to fly her, and we need them fast.”

  “How fast? You said I’d be training kids.”

  “You will. We’re finding the younger the better, actually. Which means problems of parental consent, and God knows what else, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

  God. Mon Dieu. Children. Again. “What’s the tearing hurry?” Sir. There’s something about the way army wants to settle back over me like a well-worn shirt. Maybe this is where I belong.

  God. No. Or should I be praying to St. Jude about now?

  “Well, Casey, here’s the deal.” He leans against the edge of my desk, resting his weight on one buttock, so close I can smell his cologne. “We’ve got competition. This project has been under way for about ten years now, and, unfortunately, we’re in a race with the Chinese to get there first. You understand what happens if they get the kind of capability you saw yesterday before we do.”

  “Yes.” Oh, I think so.

  “Good.” He sets something else on my desk with a click. “You’ll need to start reacclimating to that. One ninety minutes before you go into VR and a second one at twenty minutes. No more. In the meantime, I want you to study up on the ship specs. You’ll have access to all her engineering data. Got it?”

  “Sir.” I bite my tongue. “What’s the story on the ship’s attraction to massive bodies? Where’s the theory to back that up?”

  Valens stares down at that red paper folder on my desk. His eyes are strangely unfocused, and then he looks up at me, intently. “That accident I mentioned.”