Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Kendrick looked around him. He was standing in a narrow alley near the city centre but a furtive glance around assured him that no one was paying attention to him. “Yeah, I’m alone.”

  “Is there something else I should know?” Roy asked, his voice guarded. “You sound, er, tense.”

  “Nothing you’d want to know,” Kendrick replied. “I’m just worried about being tracked via this wand. Is there any way you can make my line permanently secure from tracking?”

  “Not really, no. Only way to be sure is get rid of the thing.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Kendrick replied. “I want Buddy to know where I am.”

  “Then so will whoever’s looking for you.”

  “I know, Roy. It’s a long story. I need you to help me because—”

  “No,” Roy said quickly. “By the sound of things, maybe you shouldn’t even tell me. Keep it all on a need-to-know basis, yeah? Besides, I owe both you guys one.”

  Kendrick found it almost frightening how easily Roy created a new fake identity for him. As instructed, Kendrick used public transport to get himself to Edinburgh airport, heading for a public fax unit on his arrival. He tapped in the q-crypt key that Roy had supplied and a few seconds later the fax spat out a cream-coloured plastic card with his picture on it, along with fake retina and DNA details coded into a hologram strip, together with yet another assumed identity, also supplied by Roy. A small matt-black data-chip followed the card a few moments later.

  Kendrick studied the plastic card, memorizing the name printed there, and wondered if he could really pull this off. He’d learned how to behave on passing through Customs. The secret was not to act too sure of yourself. People who behaved too smoothly were often those who raised suspicions.

  The datachip contained his flight information and payment details. As far as the flight company was concerned, Roy was Kendrick’s legal employer. Probably the datachip would also contain encrypted financial information to do with Roy’s business. This would give Kendrick’s trip some purpose: many businesses were now too paranoid to trust their most sensitive information to the public grid, as even private grid networks had their flaws. Nanodust transmitters were only one of many technologies available to the modern corporate spy, and as a result there was still a call for human couriers to carry information physically from one place to another.

  To all appearances, therefore, Kendrick was just another courier. Okay.

  Kendrick stared past the endless food concessions and identikit bars, which had always infested airport terminals, towards the check-in desks beyond. He took a step forward, then another, wondering just how self-conscious he looked.

  To hell with it, he decided, picking up his pace. Do or die.

  In the end, Kendrick’s fears came to nothing. The check-in people asked him what he was carrying and he showed them the datachip, as Roy had instructed. A woman placed his chip in a reader and that was that – they waved him on.

  The jet was barely half-full. Not surprising, given how its destination had lost its tourist appeal in recent decades. The majority of the passengers wore T-shirts or caps that made it clear they were on their way to do relief work. Apart from them, Kendrick saw a smattering of men and women in businesswear.

  The jet boosted to the top of the atmosphere, skipping across the borderline between sky and space like a stone skimming across waves. Kendrick spent most of his time staring out the window at the deep blue of near-space.

  23 October 2096

  New York

  A few short hours later Kendrick stepped out of the terminal building at La Guardia and into utter chaos.

  There were tanks parked all the way around the airport. That was the first thing he noticed. The second thing was the sea of beggars who surrounded him the instant he stepped beyond the terminal entrance.

  Just metres away Kendrick sighted a rank of antique and battered-looking cabs, the entirely manual kind that still needed real human drivers. He headed for the first in line, pushing past all the people pleading with him. One woman, her face a mask of tears, even thrust her baby at his chest, yelling words he couldn’t comprehend amidst the commotion.

  Knowing that he wasn’t the only one having to deal with this gave Kendrick scant relief. He noticed the relief workers from the same flight pushing just as hard against this human tide but they looked like they had more experience of it. A phalanx of them just bulldozed through the beggars, heading for a private-hire bus parked a little way beyond the taxi rank.

  Kendrick kept asking people to step out of his way but they thrust themselves in his path all the more eagerly. He could see soldiers sitting on top of some tanks in the distance and imagined that they were watching the scene with detached amusement.

  Out of the corner of his eye he spotted another passenger from his flight – a business type – literally battering the beggars aside with his aluminium suitcase. The man bulled on through, his technique appearing to work.

  Giving up any pretence at the niceties, Kendrick followed his example. He propelled himself forward, smacking against shoulders and heads with his elbows. It was, indeed, the only way. Things were bad all over in his native country, but he’d forgotten just how bad.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered once he reached the first of the taxis. A woman whom he recognized from his flight – small and chocolate-skinned, with short, cropped hair and wearing a T-shirt that read NEW YORK AID RELIEF in large block letters – had reached the cab behind his. A scrawny young girl, who couldn’t have been older than ten, was standing right next to her, thrusting little tinfoil-wrapped packages at her. The relief worker managed to ignore the girl as if she wasn’t even there.

  Kendrick stared at the child and thought of his daughter.

  He looked back up, suddenly catching the woman’s eye. “Jesus won’t help you,” she said with a cheery smile, her accent a soft drawl from somewhere south of Virginia. “But I can give you a ride into town if you like.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got to make my way somewhere . . .”

  The beggars were trailing off as fresh meat from some other flight began exiting the terminal. The relief worker had the door of her cab half open. She left it and stepped over to him.

  “Don’t get in that cab,” she murmured. “You’ll never see tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She leant a little closer, so he could smell her perfume. “It’s the licence plate. I can tell.”

  He stared at her, then stepped back from his cab, closing the door. The driver glared at him from inside, shook his head, and went back to reading his eepsheet. She drew him back with a gentle pressure on his elbow and nodded towards the registration plate on the rear.

  “It’s fake. There’s ways to tell. They lock you in, gas you, and steal anything valuable. As often as not they put a bullet through your head and dump your body in the river. Corpses get dredged up all the time, and nobody ever checks on them.”

  Kendrick saw the driver glance around at them and mutter some inaudible profanity. A moment later the cab shot away from the kerb with a screech of tyres.

  Kendrick watched it roar away, dumbfounded. “All I’m saying is you look like this is your first time over here,” she said. “Yet you’re obviously American, so . . .” She shrugged.

  “Weren’t you together with all those other relief workers on that flight?”

  “Nah, they’re headed for the West Coast.” She gave an impish smile. “I deal with European fund-raising for the regional administration that takes care of food relief for New York.” The woman studied Kendrick for a moment, her smile growing just wide enough to show a glint of small, perfect teeth. “Listen, I usually always stay at the same place. It’s safe and has the advantage that nobody tries to kill you in your sleep.”

  “What’s it called, this place?”

  “The Chelsea. Used to be quite well known.”

  Kendrick saw the woman with the baby moving towards them again, having pre
sumably found slim pickings elsewhere. Tears still streamed down her face and her voice was a constant wail. The baby’s mouth hung slackly and he realized to his horror that the child was dead.

  That was the worst thing he could possibly have seen. He got into the taxi: anything to avoid the sight.

  The relief worker slid into the seat beside him.

  “My name’s Kendrick,” he said. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “No problem at all. I’m Helen,” she said, smiling. “Chelsea Hotel, please, driver.”

  Helen swayed against Kendrick’s shoulder as the cab pulled sharply around a corner, between looming and run-down brownstones. Something had been niggling at Kendrick’s memory. “The Chelsea Hotel – I feel like I should know that name.”

  Helen nodded. “You used to get a lot of artists and musicians staying there. They’ve been going there for a long time, well over a century. I suppose it used to possess what you’d call bohemian charm.”

  The cab pulled to a stop right outside a twelve-storey brownstone. “Look, I’ll pay for this,” Kendrick offered, finding his wand.

  She squinted at the device. “Isn’t that thing something of an antique?”

  He smiled quickly. “I don’t like the, ah . . .” He shrugged amiably.

  Helen raised an eyebrow a millimetre or so. “I didn’t take you for the type to get upset about subderms. Makes my life easier, though, if I want to pay for something in most parts of the world.”

  “Maybe so, but it bothers me. And I don’t mind if people think I’m old-fashioned.” Which was bullshit, of course: Kendrick’s augs would fritz the subdermal implants that everyone else used to pay for their goods and services – or even to make phone calls.

  She sighed. “Well, that wouldn’t do you much good round here anyway.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out some crumpled notes. “Stick with cash here, long as you’re in town. Foreign currency only – yen, if possible.”

  As old and shabby as the hotel looked from the outside, it was a different story on the inside. At some point the building’s original innards had been ripped out and the present internal architecture was of a much more modern design.

  “Listen, I want to thank you,” Kendrick told Helen after he’d checked in. He found it hard to take his eyes away from her shape under the T-shirt. She had luminous wide eyes, and she smiled prettily.

  “Then you can buy me a drink in the bar.”

  First, Kendrick went up to his room and dumped his stuff. All he had really was his jacket – and his wand, which he didn’t intend to let out of his sight. He thought again about getting rid of it but reminded himself how much harder it would be for Todd, or anyone else, to help him if he did so.

  He checked the instrument for the hundredth time since he’d glanced out of the plane window and first seen New York on the horizon. Todd’s GPS tracker told him that Hardenbrooke was already somewhere in the city. That meant there was a chance that Caroline was somewhere nearby.

  Kendrick resisted the urge to run out and start looking for her immediately. He had to be careful if he didn’t want to end up in the same boat as her. Rest up, he told himself; he was feeling jet-lagged, run-down. He wasn’t sure that he could handle the pressure of so much happening.

  Kendrick showered, then studied himself in the mirror for several seconds. As he got dressed and headed for the bar, he wondered about the guilt he was feeling.

  Later.

  Kendrick leant over to smooth one hand along Helen’s jeans-clad thigh, feeling her small hands slide up around his head, then reach down to tug at his shirt. She pulled him down towards her and they kissed deeply. He let his fingers slide under her own shirt, feeling the firm curvature of her breasts.

  Caroline – did he still love her, he wondered? Maybe he hadn’t really accepted that it was over between them. She’d been right, after all: he had deceived her.

  Helen slid down, still lying under him on the bed, and started to wriggle out of her jeans.

  Every muscle in Kendrick’s body ached; for months – no, years – he’d been wound up like a steel spring, wondering if he was going to live, wondering if he was going to be allowed to live. And he noted with a certain detachment how easy it was to put everything that had been happening out of his mind – just for a little while.

  Helen pulled her T-shirt off, her jeans already on the floor. Then Kendrick was inside her, feeling her hips rise to meet him – not Caroline, whose face was still hovering, unwelcome, in his mind’s eye, but this woman Helen.

  How long had it been? A long time – there’d been nothing like this since the break-up with Caroline. Alcohol buzzed in his brain.

  Just then, as Helen shifted under him, her body moving with a languid animal rhythm, it was easier to think of Caroline not at all.

  24 October 2096

  The Chelsea Hotel, New York

  When Kendrick woke a few hours later he knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

  Helen coughed, a soft sound verging on the inaudible, but enough to cause him to wake up to near-darkness, the only light a thin yellow luminescence seeping in from the street lamps beyond the drapes.

  He did not even need to move to know that Helen was no longer lying in the bed beside him. Perhaps, he thought, she had picked this as an opportune moment to dress and leave for her own room.

  The sound of her cough reflected off the hard surfaces of the hotel room’s walls before arriving at Kendrick’s ears. There his augmentations processed the sound through a variety of arcane algorithms, thus generating a crude map of the space contained by the four walls.

  So Kendrick did not literally “see” Helen standing in one corner of the hotel room, but he could sense her.

  Then another sound, a faint creak that Kendrick interpreted as his wallet being opened.

  Alarmed, he lifted his head a few inches from the pillow. Now he could make out her silhouette.

  She stopped then and glanced over at him. He could not be sure if she could see him watching her.

  “Helen?” he said softly.

  She turned away again, and his eyes, more fully adjusted to the light, could now see that she was studying the contents of his wallet. Angry and confused, he slipped naked from the bed and went over to her. He reached down to take the wallet from her hand, thinking how easily he’d been taken in and that she was nothing more than a thief.

  Helen whirled, her limbs and torso blurring in motion. Some enormous force lifted him and threw him against the opposite wall. He landed back on the bed, its springs creaking in protest. A cheap framed print tumbled from the wall above the bed and fell to the floor.

  She flew at him across the room, and at once he realized that she was an Augment. The heel of her fist slammed into Kendrick’s chin, pressing him so hard into the mattress that he could feel the springs digging into his spine.

  However, she no longer held the advantage of surprise. Kendrick twisted his legs and thighs upwards, allowing him to slide a few inches down lower on the mattress and dislodging the main focus of her grip. Grabbing at Helen’s hair, he pulled her face down towards him. Then he dug the fingers of his free hand into one of her eyes, feeling a sense of satisfaction bordering on the sadistic when he heard her scream.

  As she managed to twist out of his grasp he seized the chance to pull himself off the bed. She came at him again, kicking and punching blindly.

  Kendrick barely managed to fend off her attack. Whatever kind of augmentation Helen had, it made her react faster than he could.

  Still, he had learned in the Maze what he was capable of, so he managed to block some of the blows that rained down on him at lightning speed, if not all of them. Helen glared at him, the flesh around her right eye now bruised and raw-looking. As one blow caught him on the side of his head, Kendrick felt the back of his skull rebound off the hotel-room door. He heard wood crunch under the impact.

  While he was still dazed, Helen pushed him to the floor and, gripping the top of his head
in both hands, began to slam his cranium against the floor.

  The first couple of impacts stunned him and he tasted blood. It didn’t take long for him to lose consciousness.

  The sound of someone drawing on a cigarette. Then a silence, lasting several seconds.

  “Awake yet?”

  Kendrick heard footsteps moving closer. A hollow click, as of the safety being taken off a gun. Tensing, he found that he was tightly bound, the bonds cutting painfully into his flesh.

  A painful tearing sensation as the blindfold was removed, and he stared up into sunlight so bright that he had to screw his eyes up tight against it. He tried to speak but found that he’d been gagged.

  Kendrick stared up at a face reduced to a hazy silhouette by the jagged ferocity of the sun at high noon. Wherever he was now, it was somewhere very hot.

  The dark outlines at the edge of his vision told him that he’d been deposited in the boot of a car. His body was folded up painfully in the limited space.

  Hands dragged Kendrick out, the hard metal lip of the boot scraping painfully against his flesh. Now he could see that his wrists were bound in front of him with narrow strips of white plastic. Although these strips looked relatively fragile, he could barely flex his hands.

  With some dismay, he realized that his legs too were bound. He fell down hard on a dusty desert road.

  A handgun wavered into view, a vicious-looking thing with a long barrel. Its muzzle was pressed against his temple.

  “Here’s the deal.” Now he could make out Helen’s face. “If you need to take a leak or a shit, the time is now. Then you’re back in the car.”

  As Kendrick nodded, she tucked the gun into her jeans and yanked his trousers down around his thighs. He felt a hot flush of humiliation.

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m enjoying this,” Helen muttered, “but there is absolutely no fucking way I’m going to untie you.”

  She dragged him to the side of the road where the tarmac merged with rough desert grasses, then kicked him over onto his side.